How to Find Employees Who Fit Your Company’s Culture
1. Feature Article
How to Find Employees Who Fit Your Company’s Culture
By John DiJulius, Chief Revolution Officer
One of my more popular articles was The 3 Best Ways To Make Your Interview Process Ungameable. It is so important to select people who are going to align with your core values and company culture. One way or another everyone you hire contributes to your culture. Through research I have found three more best practices that help find those true future rock stars versus the posers.
The first two come from Jesse Cole, the founder of Fans First Entertainment and owner of the Savannah Bananas. He spoke at last year’s Customer Service Revolution and was interviewed earlier this year on Episode #5 of our podcast. He has so many brilliant ideas that are easy to implement.
Jesse has an amazing culture, made up of what most leaders think are the most difficult generations to manage, Millennials & Gen Z’s. Not for him—his employees are engaged and bought-in to Jesse’s core values and high expectations of a Fan First culture.
Cover Letter Videos & Future Resume Videos
Here are two examples of how Jesse finds these types of team members to join his organizations. Part of his employee interview process is to have all the candidates submit two videos: a cover letter and a future resume. “Video cover letters are huge for us because we can immediately see personality and enthusiasm from a person. Do they lift us up? Do they bring energy?” Cole shares.
“For us, both the video cover letter and future resume are tests on our core beliefs of the Fans First Way. These core beliefs are: Always Be Caring, Different, Enthusiastic, Fun, Growing, and Hungry. The “Always Be” is important because if we don’t see some of these traits from their first video introduction to us, we know it will be hard to get that out of them as a future employee,” explains Cole.
In a video cover letter, Cole’s team can spot enthusiasm and fun immediately. With future resume, they can see traits like growth & hunger. Cole says, “What do they want to do in the next five years? 10 years? Do they want to be in same position, or do they want to grow more and make a bigger difference?”
This also gives Cole’s team an opportunity to see the candidates’ creativity. How are they filming the video cover letter? What are they wearing? Where are they? Is it something normal or is it different? This is another one of their core values.
The future resume video also shows how the candidate aligns with their core values. How is the layout? What projects do they share they will work on? How much fun do they have with it or is it basic and boring? “Within a few seconds on the video we can tell if we want to hang out with that person. All of our positions are outward facing and work with our fans regularly, so this is important. If we don’t want to hang out with them, if they don’t bring energy and lift us up, why would our fans want to be around them either,” says Cole.
Don’t ask them what they would do in a situation
In his book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, author Adam Grant suggests a great way to screen out the potential employee candidates that don’t align with your organization’s value, is to present them with situational interviews. But not the way most organizations do them.
“A lot of organizations do behavioral interviews that are backward looking and asking about your history, what you’ve accomplished, what challenges you’ve overcome, and those actually don’t turn out to be very effective. They suffer from an apples and oranges problem, it’s very hard to compare it to people’s work histories,” explains Grant.
Even taking it one step further, Grant doesn’t suggest asking the candidate what they would do in a given situation, because most people would give the “right” answer, not necessarily how they would truly react in that situation. What Grant does suggest, instead of asking, “what would you do,” ask, “how do you think most people would handle…”
Most of us tend to project our own motivations on other people. So, if you give someone a scenario where it’s not clear what the appropriate behavior is, people will tend to predict based on what they would do in that situation.
*Related – How to Make an Inspiring New Employee Orientation Class
2. Bronkar Lee Performing at The 2020 Customer Service Revolution
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