• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

How will we decide who we want? What if it isn’t meant to be?

How will we decide who we want? What if it isn’t meant to be?

Many of us forget that making a match is not just about finding “the One” — the perfect person who fulfills your needs — It is about making sure you and that perfect person are compatible. The right skillset for the job to be done ( JTBD) is not the most important consideration in the recruitment process; cultural alignment is. Cultural alignment is basically the degree to which the person you have hired can deliver what you hired them for, in the environment you have provided for them. In simple English, it is how well the new hire fits into your organisation. Whether the person’s ideas about what work involves and the manner in which the workplace should be run are in sync with yours.

Let’s take it back to dating. Let’s say you have done the work to figure out what you want in the dating world. You’ve decided it is someone who really understands you. Someone you can talk to anytime, about anything. So, you find Segun/ Funke. The two of you have heartfelt, soulshattering conversations for hours on end. But, let’s say that Segun/funke believes in discussing the personal issues in their lives with their three most trusted friends. You, however, come from a background that values discretion about important things above all else. Though Segun/ Funke fulfill your immediate desire for conversation, you will be deeply dissatisfied with how the information you share with them is managed afterwards. Yes, the love might be real, but you and Segun/funke’s core values, beliefs, and behaviours are not in sync. Your communication cultures are not aligned. And your relationship will not last.

Getting and giving an honest answer to whether you and a prospective partner are compatible is imperative. When it comes to the recruitment process, making sure you and your prospective hire are culturally aligned is even more essential. The good news is that there is an easy way to measure both cultural alignment and competencies. It is called the ‘work trial’ .

Try before you buy

A work trial is when you get the final applicants to spend a few days in the office, trying out the role, before you make a final hiring decision. Job candidates “shadow their future position” and test out their skills.

A 5-day trial might seem like a costly investment to make to screen a final set of candidates. It might even be impractical in your business’s specific case. Maybe you have proprietary information you can’t expose anyone but official employees to. Maybe the candidates have a current job they can’t take that much time off from. Maybe you are hiring them for a role where they will be replacing someone, and their presence in the office will alert the soon- to- be- exemployee and cause hostility. This is all understandable.

By (m)any means necessary

However, if there is a creative way to accomplish a trial period, do it. If the applicant is unable to commit to five days at your business/ company/ organisation, shorten the trial period to three or two days. Even if the applicant can only spare a day, have them come in and try out the role for that brief time period. You will learn more about potential talent through work trials than any formal interview can give you.

Even if you are recruiting for a position that requires onthe-job training you are yet to provide, just seeing how the final applicants approach the work to be done, will give you a window into their personality. You can evaluate their critical thinking, initiative-taking and troubleshooting skills in real time.you get to see how they respond to feedback and whether they work well with your other employees. You gain invaluable insight into which candidates can answer written questions and be convincing in an interview, and which candidates can actually deliver. Just like in dating, any vetting process you implement doesn’t just benefit you.

It offers clarity to both you and the other person, on whether you will be a good match. Similarly, the work trial educates your job candidate on exactly what the role covers. They are able to assess whether their expectations of the role match yours. Are their views on how a workplace should function in sync with yours? Do the two of you share the norms and values necessary to make a workplace run smoothly?

Remember when we talked about motivators? How making sure that the prospective hire’s unique reasons for wanting to take the position, line up with the things the position provides? We gave an example of how a hire who wants a job that affords them leisure time will be dissatisfied working in a business where late closing times are the norm. Think about filtering for fit in the same way. Someone who believes that the workplace culture should be based on a flat structure, where hierarchies aren’t enforced, will be horrified by a business that is organized according to rank and lower-level staff have no interactions with upper management.

If you fail to check for cultural alignment in tandem with competencies, you might think you’ve made a match, when you have actually missed the goal.