Does your work place have a strong sense of company culture? For many businesses, it’s what drives decision making at every level of the organization on a daily basis – whether those decisions are made by a company leader, a new hire, or anyone in between. It’s the shared set of beliefs and values that keep employees working towards the same goal, and hopefully having fun along the way.
Recently, we’ve seen our own company culture come through to help us attract, select and retain new team members, despite being in the midst of a widespread skilled labor shortage. Here are several ways you can use your own company’s culture to help overcome recruitment challenges as well.
Attraction
While it can be difficult to explain your company culture to a candidate over the phone or during an interview, there are several different ways you can showcase your culture so that potential applicants can get a better sense of who you are before they apply. Social media, for instance, is an amazing tool for helping attract more talent, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter being the most popular networks. With social, you can share photos of company events and even small, day-to-day activities on a regular basis. This will give your followers a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to work for your company, and while it may seem trivial to you, it could be the one last piece a potential candidate wants (or needs) to see before applying. Likewise, sharing your company culture on social media can also be really powerful when your current employees share and like company posts. Not only does it help increase reach, but it’s also a big indicator that they love their jobs, which will resonate strongly with potential candidates.
Selection
During the interview process, your HR team and department leaders will get to know the candidate’s qualifications, job history and personality. Even more importantly, the hiring team should also look for signs that the candidate will be a good cultural fit. Will this candidate adapt to your company’s core beliefs, attitudes and behaviors? If you already have a strong company culture, make sure that person will help maintain or improve it. If you’re just starting to build your company’s culture, make sure you’re hiring people who embrace it and lead by example.
If you only hire people based on their qualifications, you may find they can be disruptive to their team and the organization overall. A study by students at the University of Iowa found that employees who fit well with their organization, coworkers and supervisor are more satisfied at work, perform better and are more likely to continue working there. The groundwork for making sure a candidate will be a good fit is laid during the selection process.
Retention
Perhaps the most important area a company’s culture can benefit is employee retention. If your culture is all about your people, providing a desirable work-life balance and offering flexibility, you will find that people tend to stick with you. As you empower your employees to actively participate in decision making and idea generation, the more involved they will be and the more pride they will take in their work. A strong company culture can mean the difference between employees leaving for higher pay and employees staying because they truly love your organization — even if you can’t compete with other companies’ wages. Happy employees refer their friends and family too, helping you to attract more talent quickly when needed.
Building and maintaining a strong company culture can be difficult, but if you have the right people in the right positions, you’ll get there. And once you are, there’s no doubt in my mind that you’ll see it helping with recruitment.
At MCL, we’re dedicated to helping manufacturers get the job done efficiently and cost-effectively. That means we’re dedicated to hiring the best people who fit our fun, innovative and hard-working team. If you want to read an example of how our engineering team and production team collaborated to ensure success on a project, read Solutions-Based Engineering Leads to Successful Mass Production of USCG Boats. Click the button below to read the case study.
