Cultural Fit

Search Firms – Yes or No?

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Recruiting agencies, talent search firms, executive recruiting companies, head hunters – all of these provide recruitment and staffing services for businesses who may not be able to or want to carry out a recruitment process internally. The decision to use an external search firm for recruitment purposes is usually based on the availability of common business variables such as time, money, and resources. It may be a more efficient approach to use an external recruiting firm if the internal resources are not available to complete the tasks. Having said that, not all recruitment campaigns benefit from the use of an external process or firm.

The opportunities for and challenges of outsourcing recruitment campaigns are reviewed in Canadian Business’ online magazine.

Click here to read the article.

As noted in the article, the issue of cultural fit is one of the concerns that must be addressed. It is critical that an external recruiter has more than the basic understanding of the technical qualification and skills requirements needed for the position to be filled. Effective recruiters must be able to ascertain or assess whether or not the potential candidate will ‘fit’ the organization’s cultural needs, before offering the candidate into the field for consideration.

The issue of cultural fit is a tricky one to navigate, especially for public sector organizations. An example of this may be provided through the recent recruitment scandal connected to the hiring campaign for the position of Commissioner with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). An executive search firm was hired on behalf of the provincial government to conduct the campaign at a cost of forty thousand taxpayer dollars. It is not unusual for public sector organizations to use executive search firms, given the constraints and obligations to ensure that taxpayer money is used in open and transparent process for all involved. Unfortunately, this particular campaign resulted in the controversial appointment of an allegedly unqualified individual with political and social connections to the current premier of the province. The appointee eventually withdrew from the process, but the impact of the scandal remains.

Click here to read about the search firm conducting the OPP recruitment campaign.

One could argue that the appointment was based on ‘cultural fit’ factors. These factors, however, have the taint of political manipulation which infected the entire process including the reputation of the search firm itself. This is most unfortunate given the fact that search firms do not make the final hiring decisions, the organization’s leaders do.

Using an external search firm does not provide for the abdication of decision making responsibility on the part of the employer. While the process itself may be outsourced, the hiring decisions remain internal with all of the leadership accountabilities and responsibilities linked to those decisions intact.

Discussion Questions:

  1. As you plan for your career in HR, what are the benefits of working exclusively for a recruiting agency?
  2. What are the cost-benefit considerations for an organization looking to hire talent through a recruiting agency?
  3. How should organizational leadership positions be filled? Through an internal (HR driven) process or through an external (executive search firm) process? Explain your rationale.

SodaStream Helps Candidates Fit In

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The basics for most recruitment campaigns begin with the premise that an organization is looking for the right person to fit the right job.

To achieve the right result, the Human Resources practitioner must design and implement a series of recruitment tools that value and measure the “fit” relationship between what a job-seeking candidate offers and what the job itself provides. There is a heavy emphasis on how these types of tools are developed so that, when implemented, they can validate the closeness of that fit to produce a reliable result. The bigger the gap between what is measured as required for the candidate and the job, the less likely it is that the outcome is a reliable, or good, fit for the organization.

This candidate-to-job fit approach seems to work best within a traditional recruitment planning process. There is an increasing trend, however, to move away from this narrow approach and use a broader strategy that seeks to recruit candidates based on the fit between potential candidate and company ethics and/or social values.

This approach is identified in a recent online recruitment campaign implemented by SodaStream International Ltd., an innovator in home-based water carbonation.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZoPBThVwk8[/embedyt]

The messages that are provided through this online recruitment campaign are clearly linked to SodaStream’s corporate and ethical values. It is an innovative and broad-reaching approach given the international growth for this particular company.

How do these values translate into tools that can be used to assess the necessary fit relationship between people and jobs? At the end of any recruitment process, no matter how creative it may be, a hiring decision needs to be made that serves the best interests of the organization. This decision may not necessarily be the one that serves the best interests of the candidate. In this case, traditional tools that measure and provide reliable results may still need to be in place in order to support the organizational decision that is made when the recruitment outcome does not support a good fit between the two.

Discussion Questions:

  1. As the Human Resources advisor for SodaStream’s recruitment campaign, design a recruitment measurement tool that is valid and reliable, based on the values identified by the CEO.
  2. What are potential challenges that SodaStream might face when deciding to exclude candidates from moving forward in the recruitment process?
  3. What types of branding/corporate messages does the SodaStream recruitment video promote?
  4. In your opinion, who is the target audience for the SodaStream recruitment campaign and is it effective? Explain your rationale.