KARLA PORTER

You con­sider your­self a good or even great Recruiter, right? You do what it takes to pump pic­ture per­fect resumes to hir­ing man­agers. You phone screen for loads of back­ground detail on expe­ri­ence and salary his­tory and avail­abil­ity dates. You answer basic ques­tions about the job and arrange inter­views with qual­i­fied candidates.

When hear feed­back that the inter­view wasn’t good, the can­di­date wasn’t a “fit” you shake your head and mut­ter col­or­ful exple­tives describ­ing the hir­ing manager’s lack of intel­li­gence and won­der how she got her posi­tion. The can­di­date was per­fectly qual­i­fied, on time and dressed pro­fes­sion­ally for the inter­view. Should have been a hire.

How does a Recruiter improve the inter­view to hire ratio?

Some Recruiters have an eas­ier time of it than oth­ers if they are work­ing with ATS sys­tems that have inte­grated psy­cho­me­t­ric pro­file assess­ments or cul­tural fit sur­veys. For those that don’t have that lux­ury,  it’s a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing but accom­plished by cre­at­ing a com­pre­hen­sive can­di­date pro­file of per­son­al­ity, atti­tudes, moti­va­tion, expe­ri­ences and behav­iors, and com­par­ing it to a sim­i­lar pro­file for the com­pany, team and hir­ing man­ager to assess the candidate’s poten­tial for cul­tural “fit”.

Recently, as guest on the Recruit­ing Ani­mal Show, the topic of cul­tural fit and a Recruiter’s role in assess­ing it came up as we dis­cussed my asser­tion that many Recruiters are on auto-pilot, sack­ing resumes from their ATS and online job board accounts and lack­ing pas­sion for their job and peo­ple. Though there was cer­tain sup­port of my view, I knew the com­ment would sting some of my col­leagues and expected the ensu­ing heated dia­log and com­ments like, “it’s not my job, my job is to present qual­i­fied candidates”.

To me that’s mar­ginal per­for­mance at best. Though it’s more work for a Recruiter, it’s bet­ter cus­tomer ser­vice to sub­mit a few can­di­dates who are not only com­pe­tency sound but also cul­tur­ally com­pat­i­ble with the organization.

After the show I con­tin­ued think­ing about the con­ver­sa­tion and decided to do a lit­tle research. Google returned 4,170,000 hits on the topic “cul­tural fit” (for all those in denial). What I dis­cov­ered is that yes, while the pre­cept of cul­tural fit is esteemed by all kinds of orga­ni­za­tions, it’s largely ignored by Recruiters who con­tinue to leave its eval­u­a­tion to the client.

Is it the Recruiter’s job to do all this? After all, the hir­ing deci­sion resides with the client. It is the Recruiter’s job if your goal is to make clients for life, have more refer­ral busi­ness, have a rep­u­ta­tion as a leg­endary place­ment wiz­ard and have hir­ing man­agers coo­ing over you singing your praises.