The Key to Hiring and Being Hired

 "The market is dead!" 

This is how it usually feels when you're trying to sell your home, There never seem to be any buyers.  

"There is nothing available..." 

More often than not, that's s how it feels when you're looking to buy a house or rent an apartment.

It's exactly the same phenomenon when it comes to hiring and finding a job

 If you're looking to attract the best entry-level talent, find specialized functional employees, or recruit senior management leaders who will fit your organization, the common refrain is, "Where are the outstanding candidates? The individuals who will fit into our culture so that they can help drive innovation and transformation?"  

But when you're the one trying to find a good job, one that will play to your strengths, allow you to be your best self in a culture that is a good fit, and that pays well, it feels like the odds are stacked massively against you.  You're often up against dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of competitors.  In a LinkedIn world, with transparency and a massive, increasingly global pool of talent, it's even more challenging.  It's especially daunting when applying for a job through a website or job posting.  It feels like you're putting your most important personal materials into a veritable black hole.  The chances of actually getting a job this way seem about as realistic as winning the lottery.

So What To Do?

If you're a hiring manager, recruit based on culture.  And if you're looking to get a good job, leverage your relationships, have you're elevator pitch down, and keep at it. 

In extensive research, Spencer Stuart has found that of the executive appointments that don't work out, approximately 65% fail not for lack of capabilities.  Rather they fall short for reasons of culture.  

All organizations have implicit cultures, the organizational norms that dictate "how things work around here." Most companies have stated or aspirational cultures, with descriptors like innovative, purpose-driven, collaborative, and driven for results.  The fact is, however, that cultures have, until recently, been notoriously difficult to define and hire into (much less change).  But today it's possible, and it pays to invest in quantifying your culture and use that as a central aspect of your hiring practices.  

How do you actually move beyond qualitative descriptions of culture to bring some hard analysis and quantification?  All you have to do is become adept in understanding and applying the Culture Alignment Framework.  Organizations can use a series of questions (via an easy-to-apply survey or card sort exercise) that will define cultural norms along two dimensions: 1) Independence vs. Interdependence on one axis, and 2) Stability vs. Flexibility on the other axis.  There are no good or bad, right or wrong. Just different degrees of how organizations think about attitudes toward change and attitudes about people that combine to create a prevailing culture.  For example, those companies that score high on flexibility and independence can be described as having a learning culture, whereas those that score high on stability and interdependence tend towards safety and order.  In all, Spencer Stuart has defined eight distinct organizational cultures.  

The state of the art in recruiting is to assess candidates based on how they would fit into these cultures.  Through asking sets of questions that measure individual styles and that map to the array of organizational cultures, we are now able to help both companies and candidates find much greater cultural alignment and as a result dramatically improve the batting average of individuals who perform, fit, and endure in their new positions.

Now if you are on the hunt for a good job, one that will be a good cultural fit for you and that will meet your other key criteria, such as industry sector, role, location, and compensation, you need to apply all key principles of job searching and leverage the tools at your disposal.  Once you have the basics down - a good LinkedIn profile and resume, a thoughtful target list of companies you would be interested in, with links to employment pages and job postings, it's time to double down on the things that really move the dial when it comes to finding a job.  Most importantly is relationships.  Two thirds of all jobs are secured by personal referrals.  Oftentimes, open positions never make it to being posted, because a trusted colleague has recommended a friend - in actuality, it's usually a friend of a friend - who could be a good fit and who is interested.  With this in mind, you need to spread the word to your first-order and second-order connections and let them know what you are interested in.

The Single Best Piece of Job Search Advice

I've often been asked what is the single best piece of advice I would offer for a successful job search.  The answer is to have your "elevator pitch" down cold. That is the one sentence answer to the question, "So, what do you want to do?" It's in your best interest to tell anyone who will listen what you want to do and why.  "I love people and travel so I'm looking to break into hospitality and leisure."  Or, "My uncle is battling cancer so I've decided to move into cancer immunotherapy."  With the laser focus of one explanatory sentence, which you should be able to roll off your tongue, you're poised to get the word out.  You truly never know where your valuable leads will come from, so think of it this way.  Every time you give your elevator pitch it's like launching a seed on the wind that may land in rich soil.  

So spend the time to research what is out there, how it links to what you're good at, and then sharpen it into a single sentence and spread the word. Later, as concrete job conversations develop, then move into researching organizational cultures, so you can do your part to achieve the all important cultural alignment. 

I don't think it's an overstatement to say that culture is the key to hiring and being hired.