Is your candidate the best one for your company?

In the selection process, while trying to find the best candidate for your team, you go through tons of resumes, recommendations, interviews and background checkings.

But beyond all the data that we can get about a professional we are considering for the position, there are other lines of information that might be even more critical and needed to really know if the candidate that we are considering is actually the best fit for our company.

So then, what are those other lines information? Well, we are talking about company culture.

When we are choosing the next team member, we need to first take a look at the team that we already have formed and study (if we don’t know already) what is the company culture that we have created. We can pay attention to our team’s personalities, language and values, and from there choose a professional that would fit in right and that can work along with the culture already existing.

That means that during the interview, we should include questions that will give us information about the candidate’s cultural fit. We can also set behavioral situations to observe how the candidate would react to some given situations, to help us figure out what reactions and way of handling things we should expect from the person we are considering for the role.

The idea behind this is to find an employee that is able to comfortably work in the existing culture.

The point for example, is that during the selection process we should be able to see beyond the resume and see if the candidate is team oriented or not. We can get a glimpse of this by proposing scenarios where teamwork is needed and see if that is the go to for the person we are interviewing or if that candidate in particular is better pushing through working on his or her own.

We also should consider that a team member sometimes is very codependent, and if we are looking for a leader, or a person that will need in the role to often take the initiative and get ahead of a problem, then most likely we should look for a professional that is really good at working alone.

If we are looking for leaders, again, we need to take a look at our company culture and see what profile of team do we have. Is this a team that is quick on giving a feedback, organizing themselves and often gives opinions and raises ideas often? Then we can not choose a classic boss that would over control a team because that would be the recipe for disaster.

We want to look at other details regarding that candidate’s lifestyle, availability and ability to be flexible with times. If we have a company that allows working from home and maximizing your time, then a person that has the schedule broken by family duties could be a good fit if they are open to reorganize their workflow to get it done though the day. On the other hand, if we have an open business, or strict hours to meet some specific schedule that can’t be changed, then we definitely need someone that can commit to the hours we are requesting.

Company culture is especially important and often disregarded when it comes to remote employees. The fact that they might not be sitting next to the rest of the team, doesn’t meet they don’t need to fit in with the culture existing. Actually, it is extremely important to find a remote employee that fits right with the personality, language and communication system that we already have, because that will make it a million times easier to get that person feeling part of the team, involved with the project and committed to their job.