A few weeks ago a client told me, “We don’t have a culture here.” If he had worked for a newly formed, three-person firm, I might have believed him. Since he worked for one of the world’s largest global banks, I thought he was joking. He wasn’t..

Just because you can’t label a culture, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. As a business community, we have an inadequate and imprecise vocabulary to describe culture. We either slap the word culture on everything we can’t measure, or we think it doesn’t exist because we can’t describe it. We talk about changing our culture when what we really want to do is change our operating norms, we believe that formalizing our values and mission statements will change our work environment and we sloppily interchange words such as politics, behaviors, beliefs and standards.

Why is culture important in recruitment and retention? Multiple studies have shown that many new employees fail because of cultural incompatibility rather than a lack of functional expertise. The recent Manchester Inc./Dimension Research study identified that 75% of the 140 companies surveyed blamed the failure of newly recruited executives on lack of fit with the company’s culture. Technical skills are relatively easy to assess; assessing an individual’s work style and its fit with an organization’s culture is much more difficult.

The difficulty of assessing “fit” has been the lack of valid tools to generate any reliable data. The assessments have all been gut feel - does the interviewer think the candidate will fit in? Does he or she seem like “our kind of person”? Will the candidate “get along with others”? Some organization’s competencies attempt to address cultural issues such as teamwork, communications and interpersonal skills but these competencies are usually far too broad to provide genuine decision data. Every organization requires teamwork, good communications skills and good interpersonal skills. But organizational cultures are not all alike.

A strong employer brand will help applicants screen themselves in or out of consideration. An employer brand which accurately reflects the type of organisation, candidates will be attracted to, or dissuaded from, will help to strengthen the recruiting process by helping candidates evaluate the opportunity.

While encouraging candidates to make an informed decision and self-select is an important step in running an efficient recruiting process, employers must apply a finer screen before extending a job offer. Determination of cultural fit requires the same rigor as determination of technical skills.

A new tool is being widely tested in the U.S. that measures an individual’s fit with a specific culture or subculture. The tool, called Culturelink, provides reliable data on candidate’s work style, approach and philosophy, and their compatibility with an employer’s culture.

Employers are becoming more sophisticated in their approach to hiring. Understanding that the intangibles play a major role in the candidates’ and employers’ decision-making process is leading companies to make important investments in branding and other tools. The hiring processes of a decade ago will appear so antiquated to professionals working in progressive organizations over the next few years that stories about the “old days” will be the subject of humor and disbelief.


Maury Hanigan is President of Hanigan Consulting Group in New York City. She is a leading expert on recruitment programmes and graduates’ perceptions of employment brands. To find out more about Culturelink please visit: www.haniganconsulting.com