Embracing company values and culture is critical when hiring new candidates.

Surveys continue to highlight the importance of company values. For example, According to PwC's 2021 Global Culture Survey, approximately 72% of business leaders suggest that cultural values enhance business initiatives.

Hiring employees that align with company values boosts productivity and retainment, which ultimately, reduces ongoing hiring costs. Forbes similarly found that companies which directly manage their values exhibit 4x higher growth than those that don’t.

“Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing” - HubSpot’s Culture Code.

So, how do you find candidates that match your company values?

What are company values?

First and foremost, it’s essential to establish what company values are - and it’s not the most simple question to answer. Company values and company culture are linked, and some businesses go as far as to create a list of published values, like Buffer’s 10 company values.

Most company values involve a blend of trust, transparency, communication, gratitude, kindness, cooperation, well-being and proactivity. They promote a can-do attitude while fostering an open work ethic that promotes collaboration.

1. Trust
2. Honesty
3. Openness
4. Kindness
5. Communication
6. Communication
7. Collaboration
8. Helpfulness
9. Gratitude
10. Well-being-first
11. Cooperation

The benefits of company values to recruiters

We can wax lyrical about the benefits of company values, but how and why do they actually help?

Communication and collaboration

Increased productivity

Enhanced retainment

The challenge of structuring values into the recruitment process

Integrating values into the recruitment process is tricky.

Firstly, it’s down to recruiters to transpose the business’s values onto the recruitment process without making their own interpretations. The right recruitment software will allow recruiters to keep company values at the forefront of recruitment strategies by showcasing them on customisable career pages, and by creating set tasks in the pipeline, such as interviews that include value-based questions.

Value-based questions

Using value-based questions in interviews is fundamental. Many popular value-based questions are reasonably common, however, and unless recruiters switch it up, they risk being given canned responses.

Here’s our list of culture fit interview questions:

1: Integrity and trust

1. Question: What does integrity mean to you?
2. Purpose: Open-ended questions are good because they invite wider discussion.


3. Question: How do you navigate success and failure?
4. Purpose: Both success and failure are important. Note how the candidate links the two.


5. Question: What do you do if you profoundly disagree with something asked of you at work?
6. Purpose: This asks the candidate to discuss an uncomfortable situation at work.


7. Don’t ask: What do you do if you see someone stealing stock/items/products?
8. Why: This common question forces candidates into a corner and asks them to respond without a reasonable knowledge of the context.

1. Question: What does collaboration mean to you?
2. Purpose: Again, an open-ended question should lead to a positive response.


3. Question: How do you take positive and negative feedback?
4. Purpose: Positive and negative feedback are both necessary. Therefore, responses should link the importance of both.


5. Question: What does teamwork mean to you?
6. Purpose: This open-ended question invites the candidate to discuss values like trust, openness, honesty and helpfulness.


7. Don’t ask: What would you do if you had to work with someone you don’t get along with?
8. Why: This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that the business is a good cultural fit. Teams shouldn’t be liable to ‘not get on’ with each other unless they’re poorly managed, or there are other issues outside of individual control.

1. Question: What does company culture mean to you?
2. Purpose: An open-ended question that invites candidates to discuss their values.


3. Question: How do you establish positive working relationships?
4. Purpose: Questions that invite positive responses help build trust from the outset.


5. Question: How can both businesses and individual employees be more socially responsible?
6. Purpose: This question targets the business and the employee, as they work together to create social responsibility.


7. Don’t ask: How do you take responsibility for your actions?
8. Why: This accusatory question is common but potentially insensitive to the range of responsibilities each individual carries through life.

1. Question: What are your goals and ambitions?
2. Purpose: An open-ended question that invites the candidate to discuss their values in relation to their goals, e.g. impacts on people, positive outcomes for their family, environment, helping businesses they align with attain their goals, etc.


3. Question: What drives your motivation at work?
4. Purpose: A question that invites intrinsic responses (e.g. personal development) and extrinsic responses (e.g. to further a team and help others move forward collectively).


5. Question: Do you ever feel like you’re missing a skill?
6. Purpose: This question probes humility to reveal self-aware candidates who are willing to grow.


7. Don’t ask: What’s your biggest weakness?
8. Why: This is similar to the above question but poorly worded. It’s likely someone will have a canned response to this question or discuss something that is too personal for an interview or irrelevant to the job.

Conclusion

Finding candidates that match company values is essential to boost business productivity, employee engagement and long-term retention.

However, values-based questions are sometimes challenging to integrate into screening processes. It’s vital to emphasise values in interview questions themselves by encouraging positive responses to positive questions. Values should be uplifting rather than overly focussed on failure and negative responses.

Organising values questions in recruitment software keeps recruitment teams on the same page throughout the process.

This is critical to naturalising values in the recruitment team, which form candidates’ first point of contact with the business.

In many ways, recruiters are advocates of company values. Here at Hiringmaster, we can help you hire culturally aligned employees to enhance growth, productivity and retention. Get your free trial today.

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