Culture and Hiring – 3 Things Your Company Can Do Better

Culture and Hiring – 3 Things Your Company Can Do Better

Your company culture – its philosophy, values, behavior, dress codes, and unique style and policies as a company – can be both a positive and engaging element in your efforts to recruit new employees. New hires that fit well within your company culture are more likely to stay with the company longer and experience greater employee satisfaction.

corporate culture

While your average background check will help weed some of the worst candidates out, leading with your culture in your recruitment strategy can improve the quality of your new hires and increase employee retention. For best effect, take advantage of your culture within your job posts, your social media, and your employee referral program.

Branding Your Job Posts

Whether you post them on your website, your social media profiles, or online job boards, your job descriptions are often the very first impression that potential applicants get of your company. Your job listing has to convey not only the position and the requirements of the job, but also information about the company itself and its values.

  • Sell your company in the job description. What do you do best? What is your mission? Why should people want to work there?
  • The language that you use should be appropriate for your company culture. A young, hip, graphic design company should use familiar, informal language to get that point across; a more staid law firm can gush just as much about their company – but in a more formal, professional tone.

Don’t Forget Your Online Presence

Business.com refers to this aspect of the process as “employee branding.” No matter how much company information you put in your job listing, candidates will seek out secondary sources of information about your company before making the decision to apply. The most popular source is your online presence: your website and social media profiles.

Since you have absolute control over these aspects of your online presence, this is a great opportunity for further expressing your company culture and values to potential employees.

  • Make sure that you present your company culture in a consistent way across all media – in tone, language, content, and emphasis on particular values.

Emphasize Employee Referrals

According to a CareerXRoads survey of 200 mid- and large-sized US companies responsible for hiring 213,000 new employees in 2011, 28% (roughly 60,000) of their new hires came from employee referrals – more than any other source of job candidates.

Furthermore, Jobvite survey data finds that 1 in 7 employee-referred candidates are hired – as opposed to 1 in 100 general applicants.  Candidates who are found through well-designed referral programs are more likely to fit with the company culture, be of higher quality, and stay with the company longer than employees sourced from other means.

  • Your employees already know your company’s values and culture. As such, they can pre-screen job candidates by only referring those individuals that they believe will fit in with the culture.
  • Potential candidates are also more willing to apply to a company where they have an “inside source” who can testify to the company’s culture and present a more believable selling point than one offered by a job recruiter or online posting.

The success of your employee referral program is predicated on your employees’ willingness and ability to recruit their friends and acquaintances. Put together a referral toolkit for your employees to set guidelines for the referral procedures and streamline the process of hiring referred job candidates.

Your company culture is an important factor in how successful new hires will be with your company. Use that culture as a tool to attract quality candidates and screen out poor culture fits by utilizing effective job descriptions, a consistent branded online presence, and a strong employee referral program.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for ResourceNation.com. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as business sales. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter, too!