Culture-Based Recruiting, Part 3: Use Culture to Attract and Select Candidates

After a company has identified the distinguishing features of its culture, as discussed in Article Two of this three-part series, the next step is to leverage these features to improve recruiting effectiveness. This is typically done through candidate sourcing, recruitment advertising and employee selection.

Candidate Sourcing
Sourcing candidates based on culture involves looking for candidate pools that share your company's values and cultural norm. This often means finding niches outside normal recruiting channels. For example, one West coast, high tech engineering firm has cultural characteristics similar to those traditionally associated with small-town Midwestern values. People in this company are very bright and do world-class work, but they tend to be relatively quiet and modest about their achievements.

A recruiter in this company finds that the most successful candidates tend to come from "engineering programs in universities that have a barn somewhere on campus." Rather than recruiting at the big name East and West coast technical institutes, the recruiter targets top-level engineering students from schools traditionally associated with agriculture. These students not only better fit the company's style, but many of them prefer it to the work environment found in the more glamorous engineering companies.

Identifying unique sources of talent requires thinking creatively about where you might find people who share your company's cultural values. An added advantage is that you may end up becoming an employer of choice among candidates from a talent pool your competitors may not even be considering. More >>>