Employers spend thousands of hours (and dollars) working on creating a corporate culture that serves their employees well; ensuring personal and professional growth opportunities are plentiful while still operating a profitable company.
Adapting to fluctuating labor trends is important to remain an employer of choice, but it shouldn’t be to the detriment of your corporate culture that remains a constant in your corporate values pillar.
With “quiet quitting” being the latest trend, consider balancing this recent phenomenon with LOUD hiring.
L – Leverage Your Strengths and Benefits
Leading with why someone would want to work for you, making your employment proposition almost impossible to refuse is how some companies are grabbing top talent quickly. It’s not always money leading the employees to work there, it may be PTO policies, a formal mentor or leadership program, or something else that future employees place value on.
O – Own Your Culture
Things change over time, and workplace norms like dress and attendance requirements have evolved in ways no one could have predicted. Corporate cultures ebb and flow based upon the corporate values important to both leadership and the employees and how they all blend together to create a cohesive work unit. One thing that never has changed, though, is a job is work for pay. We pay people to do work we need to have done. Long-term success with a company goes beyond an immediate deliverable, so people’s contributions to the organizational culture need to be considered. Hiring done using a values lens allows hiring managers to use those values as decision-making points in the process that extend far beyond the person’s immediate skillsets.
U – Understand Who Fits Best
Saying “no” to a hire that is not a fit can be stressful at first since the work needs to be done, but it can also be empowering to corporate culture because we want people who will be with us for a longer horizon. Taking stock of your higher-performing and longer-term employees – identifying what makes them a great fit for the company makes it easier for people to see someone as a good fit or not. Some companies engage these key people as cultural ambassador, integrating them into the interview process across departments ensuring culture transcends departments which can be of real value to an organization. Some companies have a stricter view on who may be a fit, but sometimes the best fit may not come in the package you expect, so stay open to character traits as well as levels of expertise that are necessary to be successful.
D – Demonstrate Values With Opportunities For Learning
People are amazing and can learn anything they set their mind to. Leading with core values of lifelong learning is one way to ensure people are always entering your hiring pipeline so that recruiting needs will ease over time. Without a learning plan, it’s hard for people to see what’s next in their journey, so they may be more inclined to look elsewhere when they start to get the itch to do something new. Engage your employees with periodic discussions about what they want to learn so your plan can be tailored to meet the needs of the employees you want to retain as your high performers.
Many candidates looking for a new role are lost at the application stage. Research shows that as many as 92% of in-demand candidates abandon their applications. Consider adding something to your candidate intake process that makes it more personal and less formal at the beginning of the process. Asking unique questions that may give you insight into how someone would fit in your culture can drastically improve these results.
Zappos is famous for its seemingly unusual interview questions, and also for having a particularly strong corporate culture. Part of the process that aligns with their is to get to know the person for who they are. Candidates are not just a number in a CRM so if you know something about them and allow their personalities to shine, you can determine how they may be a long-term fit for the organization. Some of the questions they use to unlock culture fit include:
- “What was the last hilarious thing that happened to you?”
- “If you were on a desert island, what 3 items would you take?”
- “What superhero would you be and why?”
- “Tell us about a time you overcame a challenge.”
- “On a scale of 1-10, how weird are you?”
This is a question the former CEO Tony Hsieh (who passed away in 2020) would ask people himself. “Our whole belief is that everyone is a little weird somehow,” he explained in a 2010 New York Times interview. “It’s really more just a fun way of saying that we really recognize and celebrate each person’s individuality, and we want their true personalities to shine in the workplace.”
Merito Group is a recruitment as well as an executive search firm, and we can help you combat quiet quitting, contact us here.
Merito Group is a small women-owned business providing excellence in outsourced talent acquisition solutions including retained executive search, RPO, and consulting services. Looking to hire exceptional talent? Contact us by email or 703-734-6340. To view, our current career opportunities click here.