At Pinnacle Group we talk a lot about culture and culture fit. We mean it both for our corporate employees and for our contractors who work at our clients spread across the globe.
Fitting in with the culture of the company that you are working for is a vital part of the success of both that company and you as an employee. When the culture fit is right, everyone can push in the right direction, but when it’s wrong, things are slowed to a halt until a correction is made.
That’s why getting culture fit hiring right from the very beginning matters. When Pinnacle is hiring an internal candidate, we focus so much of our interview on figuring out if this candidate is going to fit in at Pinnacle. That doesn’t mean that we are looking for carbon copies of the associates we already have, but instead personality and work style fits that work well with people we already have.
But as a staffing firm, we can’t just be concerned about the culture of our corporate office, our job is to place contractors at our client’s companies. The better the contractor fits in at the company where they are placed, the more successful the contractor is, the more successful the company is, and the more successful we are.
So how do you determine culture fit for each company?
The most important piece for finding a culture fit is knowing your client. At Pinnacle, our recruiters are highly experienced and have worked with many of our clients for years. This intimate knowledge of a company’s culture, values, and needs allows our recruiters to more readily identify their needs. When a job requirement is posted, our recruiters can quickly determine what the client is looking for and can begin screening candidates who fit these requirements.
Sometimes, a client needs specific skills and technical requirements more than anything else. Other times, the personality fit of the contractor is the most important piece of the job. Recruiters need to know these kinds of things without even having to ask.
When it comes to screening candidates over the phone, recruiters need to be able to quickly ascertain whether a candidate is a fit for the particular job. Experienced recruiters can get a feel for this information with open-ended questions and a high emotional intelligence. No one will outright tell you if they are a fit for something (not that they would know anyway), it’s often an intuitive feeling for a recruiter. This is where having a skilled and experience recruiting team really comes in handy.
Knowing the culture of a company isn’t just about knowing the corporate values or what the company says about themselves. It also comes down to individual managers and their management styles. This information is much harder to glean for a recruiter and requires extensive research.
The most effective way to get this information is to talk to contractors that we have already placed under these managers. You’ll always get your best information from people already in these roles. This is another reason why it’s important to consistently stay in touch with your contractors even after placement.
If you’re interested in signing up to be part of Progata, Pinnacle’s Talent Platform, you can sign up here.
