Built to Last, as I've mentioned before, is one of my all-time favorite organizational development reads. It reiterates something I've found to be true in my 20-year career--organizational culture has a profound impact on how business is done in any organization. In a way that's a big "duh," but it's something that often gets lost in the shuffle.
While I think that organizations have a responsibility to themselves and to their workers to appropriately screen for culture fit during the hiring process, I also think that potential applicants need to do some screening for themselves. Throughout my career, I've found that there's a tendency for many people to assume that if the organization wants them, then they must want to work there. That can be a BAD assumption for both parties.
Jim Citrin supports my case and provides some suggestions for ensuring that the job fits YOU as much as you fitting the job. Job responsibilities, money, lifestyle and tradeoffs are Jim's primary criteria. To this list I would add two other items:
- Values--how well do the organization's values jibe with your personal values? This can be a tricky thing to find out in the interview phase, as often the organization's stated values are not actually supported by its behavior. If possible, I think it's important to ask about organizational values, as well as the organizational activities that demonstrate those values. For example, if they value "collaboration," what are some of the ways in which the organization's day-to-day activities support this value?
I also find that job seekers themselves aren't always clear about what is important to them, so a certain amount of self-assesment must occur prior to beginning the job search process. If you're not clear about what's important to you, then it will be difficult to determine if the organization meshes with what you want.
- Use of Your Strengths--will both the job and the organization help you capitalize on your strengths? While technically this might fall into the category of matching yourself to your job responsiblities, I think the critical point here is that you want to find work that maximizes your opportunties to focus on what you do best and minimizes work that plays to your weaknesses. I think that organizations would like to see this happen, too.
Marcus Buckingham in Now Discover Your Strengths, does a fabulous job of describing the importance of knowing your what you do well and finding work that allows you to do that. His perspective is that we tend to have things we do well and things that we don't do well and that in the broadest terms, these tend to be relatively fixed characteristics. For example, while an individual who is not a "people person" can learn how to interact appropriately, he is NEVER going to be as effective in working with people as the individual to whom that trait comes naturally.
I tend to agree with this observation and have made a habit of continually seeking work that allows me to leverage my strengths and, to the extent possible, minimize my weaknesses. I learned long ago that I need to avoid work that requires me to do extensive paperwork, apply rules, or think "inside the box" on a routine basis. Instead, I seek opportunities that leverage my abilities as a systems-thinker, generator of ideas and developer. Since adopting this policy, I've been much happier and far more successful, both in terms of accomplishments as well as financially.
While I would love it if job seekers did this kind of thinking and matching for themselves, my years as an HR Director taught me that it's usually not the case. So, because having a good organizational fit is so important to the creation of culture, as well as for job retention and productivity, I think it's incumbent on organizations to find ways to help job seekers think through these things themselves. To do this, I would suggest including questions in both your application and interview process that allow you and the applicant to reflect on these ideas. For example:
- What are your personal work values? What are the things that are really important to you in your work?
- How do you think our organization matches with those values?
- What would you need in your daily work life to feel that you were living your values?
- What do you perceive to be your key strengths as a worker?
- What aspects of the job as we've described it to you play to your strengths?
- If you could make this job be entirely about what you do best, how would you restructure it?
Ideally job seekers would come to you with these things already figured out. But for those times when it's not the case, I think it's worth some extra probing and discussion to help both you and the applicant decide if you're the right fit for her.
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