More to recruitment than beer

What happens when a boss tries to foster a more inviting workplace, but not everyone feels ­invited?

What happens when a boss tries to foster a more inviting workplace, but not everyone feels ­invited?

Employers often aim to hire people they think will be a good “cultural fit”, with attributes that will mesh with a company’s goals and values. But their efforts easily can veer into a ditch where new hires all look, think and act alike. That’s bad for anyone who cares about an office with a mix of races, sexes and points of view.

“What most people mean by culture fit is hiring people they’d like to have a beer with,” says Patty McCord, a human res­ources consultant and former chief talent officer at Netflix.

“You end up with this big, homogenous culture where everybody looks alike, everybody thinks alike and everybody likes drinking beer at 3 o’clock in the afternoon with the bros.”

An alluring culture is a coveted prize in today’s tight US labour market, surging to first from fifth place in the past five years as the most important factor in recruiting top talent, according to a Korn Ferry survey of 1100 hiring managers last year. But there’s a difference ­between cultural frills such as office ping pong and craft beer, and deeper ones that mean more. To employees, it means loving a job for more than the pay cheque. And to employers it means staff will keep working hard even when no one is watching.

Making a good match can be difficult. In a pattern researchers call looking-glass merit, hirers tend to look for traits in candidates that make them feel good about themselves. These may be more nuanced than race or gender. A manager who received bad marks in their first year at university is likely to warm to an applicant who also got off to a rough start, research shows. Or a hirer who attended a low-prestige school may favour applicants who did the same.

“What most interviewers are looking for and acting on is more of an intuitive sense of, ‘Would I get along with this person?’ and that often isn’t very reliable,” says Kirsta Anderson, global head of culture transformation in London for Korn Ferry.

Employees err in taking a job because it offers office ping pong, free lunches or heated toilet seats.

McCord recently met an HR executive who claimed to keep staff happy by serving up the latest craft beers. “Well, that sounds like a fun vacation. I’d probably go to that resort. But that’s not what you’re here to do,” says McCord, author of Powerful, a book on building workplace cultures.

Hiring managers need to go deeper and figure out whether ­applicants are in synch with more fundamental elements of their culture, Anderson says. Are they excited about how the company innovates, serves customers or makes a social impact? Will they mesh with the way individuals and teams at the company work, by collaborating or com­peting? Will they naturally make ­decisions the way the ­employer wants, individually or as a group, embracing or avoiding risk?

It isn’t easy to suss out those traits in an interview. Jeanne Leasure, a human resources executive, recalls interviewing ­applicants for a job that gave ­employees a lot of autonomy. She was looking for recruits who were self-starters but wound up hiring one who turned out to be a loveable slacker.

“We hit it off, we had similar personalities”, and the applicant gave convincing answers when she asked him about past accomplishments, she says.

But on the job, he didn’t have as much drive as she’d hoped, says Leasure, who recently was named senior vice president, people, at SpotX, an ­­ad-tech company based in Colorado. She has begun asking more probing questions, such as: “What was your work ethic like as a teenager?”

The Wall Street Journal