Organizational culture plays a huge role in the success of any organization. Employees who align themselves with the culture of the organization can understand the needs of the higher management.
It is the employer's job to see that the hired employees follow the same values and culture. So, how can you understand whether an employee is a cultural fit for your organization? You can understand this from their answers to your interview questions.
The article focuses on 10 common interview questions determining if the applicant is culturally fit for your organization.
Before we go on to the questions, let us briefly understand the concept of culture fit and why it is important for your organization.
What Does Culture Fit Mean?
Culture fit is a very common term used while recruiting. This assesses the values, behaviors, and beliefs that a potential applicant might follow. The understanding is necessary to determine if the applicant's values align with those of the company and employer.
An organization's culture covers a broad area such as employee interaction, communication skills, work ethics, etc. Since an organization is majorly dependent on the employees, they must be the perfect culture fit.
Having an employee whose culture does not align to that of the employer will negatively impact the organization. To avoid this, companies are putting immense emphasis on culture fit while recruiting their staff.
Why Is It Important to Hire a Culture Fit?
Company culture contributes to a major part of business success.
To make this point stronger, we have mentioned some of the notable reasons why hiring a culturally fit employee is important.
When an employee cannot culturally align with the organization's needs, they will leave. Having high employee turnover can be bad for your business and also very costly.
If you have employees frequently leaving your organization, it does more damage than good. Hence, when you hire a cultural fit, you benefit in various areas such as productivity, recruiting expenses, and training costs.
A cultural fit will love their job and give their 100% towards their work. You will have a satisfied employee whose performance would be at a very high level.
Even if people love their job, having a miserable work environment will affect their performance. However, this will not happen with a cultural fit.
They will align their needs to the organization's needs, and this will reflect on their performance.
If people are miserable in your organization, they will also impact their surroundings. Hence, it would negatively impact your other employees as well.
The work environment will suffer a lot, and this will manifest in every employee's performance.
Overall, we can say that a cultural fit will bring positive changes to your organization. They will work happily and ensure that the work environment is motivating and positive.
How Can You Assess Whether a Candidate Is a Cultural Fit?
Finding a cultural fit may seem like a hard task. This is mostly because candidates tend to lie in their interviews to get the job. However, you still have ways to understand whether the employee will be the right cultural fit for the company.
Every company has a vision, mission, and values. Before you go on with the interview, explain these to the prospect. This way, the interviewee will know what the company wants from them.
Ask questions that would extract past behaviors of the candidate. Ensure that you form questions that will help you understand whether the candidate can adhere to your company's values.
The questions can be about their work ethics, work process, how they would react in a particular situation, etc.
Along with the answers, you must also consider the job interview body language of the interviewee.
Many interviewers avoid this stage, and this could create gaps in the interview results. You must note down the answers as said by the interviewee.
When you discuss the same with the other managers, there would be no scope for interpretation or guessing. You can judge the interviewee based on exactly what they said.
Having a rating system makes the process more quantitative as opposed to being subjective. This ensures better and quicker results without any delay in understanding. You can try out a 1 to 5 rating system for an easier approach to this.
Platforms such as Evalufy help you screen much faster. This platform initiates video interviews and lets you create customized assessments. You can capture the responses to help you evaluate the candidate fast and easily.
There are several assessments that you can use to make the job interview more productive and engaging.
What Are the 10 Most Common Cultural Fit Job Interview Questions?
Below are some of the interview questions that you could ask to hire a culture-fit candidate.
Reason: You can understand whether the employee will be more comfortable in an independent or directive workplace. Depending on the type of work environment you follow, the answer will provide a very clear idea.
Reason: Not everybody forms personal relationships with their colleagues. Many find maintaining a professional relationship to be a better idea. However, if you are a company that encourages personal bonds, you need to understand the prospect's viewpoint.
Reason: Coworkers will not always agree with each other. However, this should not negatively impact their bond. If the person cannot handle disagreement, they might not work well with other people.
Reason: This question is more of a pre-employment personality test based on how your company works. A person may work better alone, but your company might often have group projects. On the other hand, a person might prefer working in teams, but your company encourages independent work processes.
Reason: Having a work-life balance is crucial. That being said, taking work home is not always a bad thing. However, you need to see the reason behind this action. Does the employee take work back home because they are slow at working in the office or due to work overload?
Reason: These will vary, but each answer will help you understand how the employee perceives your company. It also specifies whether the three things that you think are good about your company match the employees' answers.
Reason: Understanding the psychology of the employee is crucial. This question is a psychology test of how your prospect handles a stressful situation. Since stress is inevitable, you need to understand how easily the person can get stressed out.
Reason: If your workplace has projects that can often be challenging, you need employees who can overcome them skillfully. The employee should not give up easily, or they would not be suitable for your organization.
Reason: This question answers a lot of things for you. You can understand whether an ideal day for them is an easy-going one or full of challenges. Does the prospect give importance to breaks and employee communications, or is it all about work?
Reason: This shows what the employees think is important for a workplace. You can further compare them with your values and see if they align.
Wrapping Up
These are some of the questions that you could ask during the job interview. The answer to these questions will help you understand whether the employee would be suitable for your company.
The questions target different areas of your employee's behavior and values. Hence, you can piece the information together to form a complete profile of the candidate.
If you find that the answers are in line with your company's requirements, you could go on with the hiring process. In case both of your values are different, then it would be best to reconsider. You can come up with more questions to understand your prospect better.
Evalufy is an effective video interview platform that can help you ask the right questions and get a culturally fit candidate for your company!
