Marc Tobias - Managing Director, DMJ Recruitment
Since starting at DMJ, I’ve been impressed with the company’s commitment to having up-to-date policies and processes to ensure we all operate with diversity and inclusion in mind. As part of these initiatives, the entire team recently completed a challenging but eye-opening diversity and inclusion training workshop with Baljit Kaur, a Diversity and Inclusion Specialist from Innate Consultancy.
The training was extremely beneficial, although difficult and challenging at times. It forced all of us to think about and discuss uncomfortable scenarios, and to open up about our own experiences. One particular scenario that resonated with me was around culture.
Many clients tell us how proud they are of their culture, and the importance of cultural fit when it comes to exteal hires. By “cultural fit” they mean someone who can easily slot in with the firm’s current values, ethos and approach. There are definitely benefits to approaching a hire this way as it makes it easier to embed them in to your business. However, doing this over and over again will lead to your team – one that reinforces beliefs and ideas through repetition within a closed system leading to your team becoming stale and pushing away the opportunity for new ideas.
A more mode and effective approach is to focus less on searching for a candidate with a perfect cultural fit and to celebrate those positive qualities that fall outside of your current culture. This has been termed ‘culture add’ and these are hires who value an organisation’s standards but bring different positive aspects. They challenge the current status quo and force companies to evolve and change for the better.
If you’re hiring and want culture to be a key part of the process, here are some important things to consider
- What does your current culture look like and how do you want it to look?
- What is missing and what type of candidate can plug those gaps?
- Which of your organisation’s standards should your new hire possess?
- How will a new hire reshape your company’s culture?
There’s nothing wrong with focusing on culture, and when we work long hours it helps to have people who we get on with. However, getting on should mean sharing the same business goals rather than being able to go for a drink after work with them. Those teams that look to add to their culture are the ones that are going to be able to come up with innovative and creative solutions, that will enable them to grow.
Posted 13/10/2021 By Rickza Mahmood