Hire for skills and cultural fit

The tools that mean you don’t need to choose between skills and fit when hiring

A certain debate that seems to keep popping up in the recruitment sphere is whether one should hire predominantly for fit or skill. You might have heard that it’s best to hire for cultural fit, for instance, because this enables whoever you recruit to acclimatise to your company’s environs quickly, while also boosting the likelihood that they will stay with your firm for longer.

But on the other hand, some people say that recruiting for skill is the way to go, because this gives you an employee who you won’t need to invest time and money ‘training up’ for the role. Such a staffer can be more productive within a shorter space of time, so the argument goes.

However, the truth is that you don’t necessarily need to sacrifice fit for skill, or vice versa. Strategies and tools like the below, in fact, will help to ensure your organisation strikes the perfect balance in terms of who it recruits.

 

The comparing of CVs

When a candidate sends you their CV, there can be a lot of information to sift through in terms of their education level, qualifications, industry accreditations and on-the-job experience. How can you possibly hope to compare an applicant’s CV to that of another candidate in a remotely scientific way?

Many ATS providers – such as Webrecruit – can provide the solutions that will enable you to organise and filter applications and CVs in accordance with your requirements for your latest vacancy.

 

Simulation assessments

Unfortunately, you can never depend entirely on a candidate’s CV when you’re assessing either skills or fit, not least because many people do lie on their CVs. A tenth of Britons admit to having done so, according to YouGov, including in relation to their education, qualifications or how much time they have spent in a given job.

In any case, a candidate possessing a high level of training or industry experience doesn’t necessarily mean they can translate all of that knowledge into useful action.

You may therefore decide to subject your candidates to simulation assessments, testing their abilities in a scenario as close to the ‘real world’ workplace as possible. This way, you can gain much more meaningful insights into their true cultural fit and skill level.

 

The interview

The job interview has been a staple of recruitment processes for decades, and it can still play an invaluable role. Again, ATS providers can greatly help hiring staff to maximise the usefulness they get out of interviews, by making it easier for them to narrow down applicants, set up appointments and communicate interview details to candidates.

But it’s also important to acknowledge the very real flaws of interviews – they are a very subjective art form, after all. There’s therefore a risk that overly relying on them will cause you to select the candidates that you merely like best, instead of those representing the best cultural fit for your vacancies, or who have the most suitable skill-sets.

 

Bring together all of the above elements when devising your hiring strategy, and you can better equip your team with the data and evidence they will need when judging candidates on the basis of both cultural fit and skills. Why not click through to discover our latest case studies showing how we have become one of the most trusted ATS providers today?



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