Want to know how to identify the culture within your business and attract the right talent to complement it?
The word “culture” is a bit of an HR department buzzword these days. Companies know they need it, managers want new people in their team to fit it, and recruitment and HR teams are desperately trying to identify exactly what it is so they can hire people based on it.
Company culture
Think of company culture as the personality of your company. If you are Apple selling iPhones and other electronics in-store, you’re going to look for passionate tech enthusiasts to be the frontline, meeting customers at the door and educating them on their electronics. Throw in a technically inept employee who has no excitement for innovation and the number of customers coming into your store is going to drop. The same applies to larger businesses where it is not always so easy to visualise the type of person who matches your company.
An easy way to look at your culture is to look at your values. If your company values are centred around hard work and dedication, then it is likely you should be hiring people who are motivated and excited to work in a fast-paced organisation where they understand there will be pressure to work hard and deliver excellent results. In this example, hiring people who want flexibility and autonomy may not be nurturing your company values.
Team culture
In medium to large businesses, team culture is often equally as important as the overall culture of the company. For larger businesses, these teams tend to operate as individual business units within the greater business. While the company culture may be something that spreads through the whole organisation, every team will be unique and every new hire adds to this dynamic. If you have a team made up of young people who require discipline and structure, you should likely be hiring others who will respond well to discipline and structure.
Why are company and team culture important?
Every person adds their unique flavour to a company. In the corporate office, it may be easier to manage the dynamics amongst these people, but on a mine site – for those with more traditional mining jobs – this can prove more difficult. Selecting the wrong people can be detrimental to your company’s culture, and on a mine site it could be harmful to the efficiency of the site or the safety of your employees. As they say, “one bad apple spoils the bunch”. This is never more true than when applied to company culture.
How to identify the right fit
Once you know your company culture, you have to learn who fits it. The easiest way to discover this is through a series of questions in either a phone screen or in the interview, to learn about what environment this applicant needs or desires to thrive. Mining recruitment can be challenging; here are some questions to help you identify who matches your culture:
- What is your ideal workplace?
- In what environment have you produced the best results?
- Which was your favourite past job and why?
- Describe the best manager you have worked for.
These questions will help you narrow down the optimal environment for each candidate and assess if or how that fits with your organisation.
If you need help finding candidates to fit your culture, why not contact the team at MPi to help? We are specialists in mining employment and thoroughly understand