Sometimes the perfect candidate may seem to appear right in front of an employer. This person possess all the skills necessary, has a great work history, solid references, an all-around ideal match on paper and great in the interview process. To even sweeten the deal with the position being offered, with all it entails: the compensation, duties, and benefits; it’s exactly what the candidate is looking for. You couldn’t have asked for anything more. You go ahead and hire the individual and everything goes smoothly at first. However, time goes on and over a short period of time this pairing starts to crumble; and the employee slowly becomes dissatisfied with the work, and the company finds that the new hire doesn’t seem to connect right with the organization.
Most likely neither party will be able to be able to explain where exactly the fault lies in this sort of situation, chances are this is a simple matter of the employee not being a good match with the company’s corporate culture. An executive search firm recommends a few simple guidelines for companies to follow so they can avoid these situations.
To start with a company needs to have a clearly defined corporate culture. Many company’s put this in writing as their mission statement, for those who do not, this is the best place to start. This is where you can examine the parameters of what your company wants to achieve and what it takes to succeed within the company. List out the personal traits such as the ability to take risks, entrepreneurialism, organizational skills etc., that and person would have to possess in order to be a successful part of the company.
There are many other factors to consider when touching on a company’s corporate culture. These would be the way that an organization works to reward the employee successes, the degree of teamwork that is required of each team member, the level to which communication takes place between the employees and management and how it takes place and an examination of the real world environment where the employees actually have to physically work. A large number of these sorts of culture clashes can be recognized and avoided by simply arranging for that individual to shadow the existing employees for a short time and then organizing together again to measure the applicant’s perception to the company’s environment and internal procedures.
Locating a suitable cultural match between employer and employee should be a priority concern when conducting an executive search, even though a poor cultural hire may not result in any sort of ramifications for the company, it is in no way an ideal situation and should be avoided as much as possible. The workplace, for most and most people seem to forget this, is where many people spend most of their time, make that place uncomfortable and no one will want to stay there. Even though there is no harm from a bad pairing, on the other hand, when and ideal pairing comes up and the individual and company work in tandem, a higher level of productivity can occur creating overall effectiveness and this should be the overall goal of any new hire.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
