Getting New Hires Right From Here On Out

By Henry Nothhaft, Jr., Alioth

Henry Nothhaft, Jr. is the President and Chief Product Officer at Alioth, the new standard for building exceptional teams and culture.

My colleague at Alioth, Rusty Rueff, recently described returning to work post-COVID as the reentry of a rocketship from space. If we come in too steep and fast, we’ll burn up before we land; if we come in too slow and shallow, we’ll crash off the Earth’s surface. It requires the kind of precision and fine-tuned adjustments that are simply difficult to imagine.

I love this metaphor, and it’s something we’re all experiencing at this unique moment.

None of us can deny how much the past year has changed not just our organizations and how we work, but our employees as well. The biggest challenge as we consider what the “return to work” will look like remains that we simply don’t yet know just how much change has actually taken root.

The workforce has adapted to remote working and new routines, new tools and ways of collaborating, and entirely new workflows. In a January 2021 remote work survey from PwC, 34% of employees reported being more productive now compared to 28% before the pandemic.

These changes are especially evident when we think about re-ramping for hiring. For those of us serving as leaders in our organizations focused on recruiting, we understand that a good hire can have an outsized impact on our business. Of course, the opposite is equally true. A hire that is the wrong fit for the organization can have effects that linger well beyond the bottom line.

We know that good hiring is not about simply finding highly skilled people, and that the often unspoken truth is that bad hires are not the result of bad candidates, but rather the product of poor cultural fit for the organization. To hire well, we must first understand the company culture that we’re hiring into.

So how do we hire for cultural fit when our company cultures are in such a dramatic state of flux?

In a survey from June 2020, 52% of job seekers said they are concerned about company culture when assessing a job offer, up from 38% just a few months earlier. The pandemic forced many employees to recalibrate their priorities in relation to their jobs and careers, which certainly accounts for some of the delta of current vacancies we’re now seeing.

It’s also worth noting that with most companies having adjusted to working remotely in some form over the past year, the friction point of changing jobs has never been lower for employees.

Just as employees have done, companies likewise need to reassess their priorities right now, not only in how they are presented top-down in bold mission statements but more importantly, how they are actually lived in the day-to-day experience of working in the organization.

While company values offer a necessary foundation, how they are implemented and experienced in a company’s culture are always evolving. Assessing and addressing that alignment is a continuous process. And for many organizations, the past year tested how well those values can actually flex and extend during volatility.

Likewise, the hires you make today determine how well the on-the-ground reality — the lived experience — of an organization will continue to reflect those first principles into the future.

One thing we’ve learned in the many cultural diagnostics we’ve conducted over the past year through our Alioth Exploration platform is that the lived culture of an organization manifests within the established norms, behaviors and routines of the collective, not what is overtly expressed in the employee handbook or a job posting.

As we return to work, hiring discussions will be understandably focused on our adjusted modes of work: in-office, remote, or hybrid. It’s important to remember though, that this conversation only serves as a proxy for employee values on how they spend their time.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to what work will, or should, look like in the next few years, but it should be guided principally by employees’ new modes that optimize their own productivity and time. Employers need to respect that, and to think we can simply flip a switch between hub and home is not only insensitive, it’s unproductive and potentially disastrous.

In assessing candidates, it will likewise be less important whether they prefer remote, in-person, or hybrid working situations. As has always been the case, finding the right candidate is about aligning with the company values, and ensuring that your company experience encompasses those values through its culture. After all, the goal isn’t compliance to the job, it’s commitment to the career.

So before you can hire, you must first recognize how your culture has changed.

Take a look in the mirror and reaffirm your core values, but much more importantly, be incredibly, truly honest about how your workforce is experiencing the culture of those values over the past year, and what may need to be re-evaluated internally.

Whether you are going to be office-primary, hybrid, or fully-remote, the re-alignment of values and culture is the necessary first step. The space between the culture on paper and the culture in real life has never been bigger or more complex than it is right now.