Many of you know the pain of hiring someone with the exact skills you need and then finding out, sometimes in a disastrous way, that they don’t fit. I can hear the sighs and grunts through distance and time. 

Many of you have also hired someone knowing you have problems in your culture and have been unsure of when or how to spill the beans, if ever, about those problems. Perhaps your new employee will discover them for themselves and just know that every company has its problems? A cringy, hopeful face accompanies that last sentence because you know what happens if you choose that path.

The Unknown Truth about Hiring for Culture

The unknown truth is it’s powerful for you to be forthright with your candidates about the liabilities in your culture BEFORE you hire them. If you set their expectations about what they’ll experience when they come on board, there will be far less drama (people leaving quickly, hours of talking about the problems you knew were there, and you trying to rebuild broken trust when they see the problems). Enlist your new employees to help you get where you want to be. Get them to see their part in making an awkward or difficult situation better. They’ll respect you and thank you for it. They’ll be ready for the hard work of being on a team, even with a few warts. They’ll gladly help you build a better company.

The Hard Truth about Hiring for Culture

Hiring for culture isn’t simple. You have to know:

  • The actual culture you have – identify the assets and liabilities in your culture.
  • The culture you want – gather the leadership team to design the best culture for your growth plans.
  • A plan to communicate the difference between the two – get your hiring team clear about the gap between what you have and what you want and ensure they are talking to candidates about it in the way you want.

What’s Next 

Critical to taking advantage of the Untold Truth and facing the Hard Truth is an unconventional hiring team. Enlist the people who will help you hire for a healthy culture. Don’t just abdicate hiring and give it to someone who knows HR. The Unconventional Hiring team is a combination of all kinds of people, even if your current team is just you. Enlist this hiring team to figure out the plan to face the Hard Truth and participate in hiring for your actual culture like a rockstar. 

A gift for being curious and reading through to the end – an excerpt from The Hire EffectTM | Hire for Culture and Skill about unconventional hiring teams.


####

M. Miche Rayment is the Founder and CEO for The Hire Effect™. The Hire Effect clients learn how to identify, organize, and get the most out of their Unconventional Hiring Teams. TheHireEffect.com