Cultural changes & hiring decisions
Personality and people-led recruitment, the future?
The way that we work has fundamentally changed due to the effects of the pandemic, but it has only served to speed up the shift in attitude towards a more empathic working culture.
What does this mean for the recruitment sector? Will we in future be hiring on personality alone rather than the skillset? We take a look at how the change in work culture is likely to impact on future hiring decisions.
The hard-nosed past
There has always been something of The Sweeney’ about recruitment historically; a macho culture obsessed by the KPIs, sales targets, working hard, playing hard, smoking and drinking on the job, an environment where the top billers would happily sell their grandmothers in order to seal the deal!
You interviewed candidates primarily on the basis of experience, demonstrable achievement and billing potential. Pretty much a case of ‘here’s a phone, get on with it’ and you would either sink or swim. Very much a case of survival of the fittest.
But the advent of social media has helped to shift the emphasis away from a purely numbers-based approach to business to one that’s far more empathic. Placing people very firmly at the centre of working life means that to roll with the times business owners need to adapt to a change of emphasis in the way they operate.
The current climate
If you had a time machine and transported one of your hard-bitten 80s recruiters into the modern age, they’d be gobsmacked by the change in work culture. A more diverse society has led to a more diverse workforce, with inclusivity at the top of the agenda. A social minefield for any dinosaur to wade through!
Plus of course, you have hybrid working to further complicate the situation. Oh, and the little matter of employee mental health, a subject that can no longer be viewed with embarrassment and swept under the carpet.
A long overdue change in culture. Hopefully our 80s recruiter won’t beg to be taken back in time and want to embrace the challenges of a more complicated World!
Different emphasis, same goal
Attitudes have and are rightly changing, but ultimately all businesses have to concentrate on the bottom line. Current hiring is of course about finding the right candidate for the right position, but that has always been the case.
When you are choosing from a number of candidates, you’re obviously going to want to make sure they will fit in with your existing team. Including the team as part of the decision making process makes a lot of sense so the decision can be a collective one, but just because someone is liked should not be the be all and end all in the final decision.
They still have to be able to deliver, or at least have the potential to deliver, otherwise you will have made the wrong decision for both your team and the business.
It’s vital, of course, to provide the right induction and training to enable newbies to slot quickly into the team set-up. The ‘sink or swim’ approach merely leads to high staff turnover and low morale. Training helps people feel more secure and is the perfect way to enable them to buy into your company purpose as well as getting them billing quicker!
Because no matter what business you are in these days, it’s all about conveying your company’s purpose, to team members, candidates and clients alike. It’s by empathising with the people that work for an organisation that a lot of buying decisions are ultimately decided. It’s no longer purely about the price.
By adopting a more empathic approach you are improving the bottom line at the same time, because it’s the empathic businesses that are the ones winning the deals and making the sales. It’s just one extra step to the process, it used to be ‘people buy products’, now it’s ‘people buy people then their products’ so it makes financial sense as well as being the right way to do business.
Happy teams are productive teams
With remote or hybrid working comes the additional need to ensure team mental health is supported as proactively as possible. There is no overestimating the importance of good banter as an integral part of office-based team culture, and this is inevitably diluted through remote working. Checking in on remote workers and ensuring that they have the means to be able to keep in regular contact with team members is essential to avoid remote workers feeling isolated.
Through adopting a more empathic approach to your hiring process, you are showing you are an attractive business for candidates to want to work with, and we all know it’s a candidate-led market at the present time. And good news travels fast on social media, if someone is impressed with your company they will be letting the World know about it. And of course, if they have had a bad experience the same applies, think Brewdog!
The final decision behind any hire though, remains fundamentally unaltered. It’s still ultimately, as it should be, a case of choosing the best person for the job. Yes, they have to be the right fit, personality-wise, but talent or potential to learn and develop will always be the key reasons behind taking the final decision to make the offer.
