How do I get my recruiter to best understand the culture of our company?

Using a recruitment agency can provide many advantages, including faster hiring, higher quality candidates and specialist knowledge, but it can also present some drawbacks. The cons usually include a higher cost, lack of employer branding and no cultural fit assessment.

Typically, recruitment agencies are fairly poor at assessing cultural fit and are therefore limited when trying to ensure the cultural fit of their suggested candidates for a position or role. Some recruitment agencies will strive to become familiar with your company goals, mission, vision and values but their understanding and experience of your culture will be nowhere near the same as of your employees who live and breathe it every day.

Most commonly, recruitment agencies will help you find the best candidate for your job vacancy, but nor for your company culture and your team.

The importance of culture fit in recruitment

Given that culture fit hugely contributes to employee retention, with a 91% chance of a new starter lasting longer than six months, plus the average cost of a mis-hire being £65,000, this needs to change.

Your recruiter needs to immerse themselves into and fully understand your company culture, as well as the role, to ensure that you receive quality, experienced candidates who are going to culturally ‘fit’ into your team and organisation.

Can’t I just tell them what it’s like to work here?

It is very difficult for people to evaluate and understand their own organisational culture. Being in a working environment on a daily basis means that any feel for culture becomes difficult to grasp. You’ll have a familiarity that you have with:

• Your interactions with your colleagues
• How meetings are conducted
• Your surroundings
• How employees communicate with one another
• The items within your office and desk area

This makes it challenging to take a step back and view your organisational environment objectively. What a good recruiter should therefore do to ensure that the candidates they are putting forward for your job vacancies are a cultural fit, is to observe your current culture for themselves.

How a recruiter can understand your company culture

It is recommended that you invite your recruitment consultant to sit in on relevant meetings, stand-ups, Zoom/Teams calls and to work in your offices. This will enable them to:

• Become an impartial observer of your culture in action, taking in how your employees interact
• See how senior leaders, for example, interact with middle managers and employees and how middle managers interact with reporting employees
• If there are conflicts, how they are resolved
• See the emotions of employees. Given that emotions are indications of your company’s values, this is important
• Get a feel for the office environment, including the items that sit on desks, what’s hanging on your walls, working and relaxation areas, furniture arrangements and any special office perks (at Corecom Consulting, we have a fantastic relaxation space with sofas, an Xbox, table football and drinks fridge).

A recruitment agency that has taken the time to get to know you, your company and your team, will be better placed to shortlist those that will culturally fit into your team. A good recruiter will:

• Have a good understanding of your business
• Act as a partner to your organisation
• Understand your objectives and the type of person you are seeking to help you achieve your goals

How to become a partner rather than a supplier

Recruitment companies have historically been guilty of (unknowingly) not working in their client’s best interests with multiple supplier arrangements on a contingency model. This has created a race to the bottom culture where:

• Speed is prioritised over quality
• Bad business practice is encouraged
• Costly miss-hires are made for clients

At Corecom we’ve decided to revolutionise how we work, engaging with our clients as partners, not suppliers and removing the pressure on the recruitment industry to compromise on quality. We’ve named this ‘Corecom Partnerships’.

Corecom Partnerships was built from the ground up to solve the recurring problems and frustrations encountered by employers when using recruitment agencies. By adopting a true partnership model we can make sure quality, not speed, is the main driver when it comes to finding the right person for your organisation. We’ll work with you to:

• Create a consistent employer brand you can be proud of, with a focus on the candidate journey
• Make sure you’re hitting the right people
• Add value to your business

Click here to see how Tunstall has transformed its recruitment process with Corecom Partnerships

We’re changing the way companies look at their talent acquisition by exposing the root cause of many of their frustrations in order to ensure they are getting the best people in the most effective way.

UK Technology Recruitment Survey, Corecom Consulting 2020