Why use cultural fit assessment?
A cultural fit assessment will help you uncover what is really of importance to your candidates when they work at an organization and see how it compares to your company.
Utilizing a cultural fit assessment can increase your retention rates by hiring candidates who are a true cultural fit with your company, and helps decrease your turnover too.
Cultural fit is the congruence of core values, behaviors and goals between your company culture and that of a potential candidate. Ensuring that your company goals and values align with a candidate’s is a good predictor of a successful long-term relationship.
Harver’s cultural fit assessment
Harver’s cultural fit assessment is a concise validated questionnaire that assesses a candidate’s culture preference across key dimensions of organizational culture.
The Harver cultural fit assessment compares a candidate’s personal values and preference for organizational culture with the actual culture at your organization or culture you are aiming to have.
It also provides you with insights into your current culture and gives you the ability to shape your culture for the future.
Know your company culture
We use the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), which is a common model for cultural assessment and a validated tool for assessing current and preferred organizational culture. It is based on the Competing Values Framework that classifies four types of corporate cultures.
Measure candidates’ company culture preferences
The Harver cultural assessment is a validated questionnaire that assesses candidates’ company culture preferences. Candidates divide 10 stars over 4 statements according to their preference, resulting in their ideal organizational cultural distribution.
Make infallible hiring decisions
Combine the cultural fit assessment with additional Harver assessments and build a powerful, unique and data-driven hiring process where your candidates get a fun experience, and you get the data.
See our culture fit assessment in action.
Book a demo and learn how you can implement a cultural fit or a variety of other assessments in your hiring process.
FAQ
Knowledge of the job and a top CV are important, but so is being able to work alongside colleagues and having the same values and goals.
Hiring candidates who are a cultural fit with your organization’s culture improves retention and employee engagement. On the other hand, hiring people who are not a good cultural fit might harm and dilute your culture, hurt staff morale, cause friction within the team and create a negative work environment. All of which will impact employee productivity and ultimately business growth.
Carrying out a cultural fit assessment will reveal insights into a candidate’s values, for example, for Gen Z, purpose is very important; for a candidate with a preference for a hierarchical company, they wouldn’t perform well in a clan-type organization.
By establishing what matters to your candidates early on, you can determine if you are in line with their values too. Cultural fit works both ways after all.
The Harver cultural fit assessment uses OCAI to not just determine the cultural fit of potential candidates, but also to establish the culture of your organization or the desired culture that you’re trying to achieve. Once the type of culture at your organization is determined, you can then measure candidate preference and compare it to your own.
OCAI defines 4 types of company culture:
- Clan – family like cultures that focus on doing things together. Places onus on mentoring and nurturing employees.
- Adhocracy – cultures tend to be dynamic and entrepreneurial in nature. Encourage risk taking and value innovation.
- Hierarchy – structured culture with clear hierarchy and control. Clear focus on efficiency and ensuring stability.
- Market – results-oriented culture that focuses on competition and rewards achievement.
While a personality questionnaire is focused on how candidates’ behavior in a role, a cultural fit assessment helps determine company fit/a candidate’s performance within the company. Use the two together to give you deeper insights into your potential candidates.
Set the benchmarks for your company culture based on a group questionnaire or an expert opinion from a culture leader (board/decision-makers). The Harver cultural assessment helps you determine the culture at your organization but also allows you to figure out what you’d like your culture to be and hire people who can help you get there.
Assessing for culture fit doesn’t mean you will harm your diversity recruiting efforts. You can still hire diverse candidates, but the key is to hire diverse candidates who share your same values and beliefs. Background, ideas, gender, sexual orientation or the myriad other factors that make candidates unique won’t stop a person from wanting to achieve the same goals, values, and beliefs as your company.
Hiring for cultural fit doesn’t mean that you’re looking for the same type of people, it means you’re looking for people who complement and contribute to the company culture, but who also have a high chance of being successful within the company.
Assessments with strong levels of predictive validity simplify the selection process and improve the accuracy of results.
Various studies have investigated the dimensionality and internal consistency of the OCAI, which has proven to be a viable method of assessing organizational culture.
The instrument also demonstrated predictive validity due to its array of significant relationships with job satisfaction, which is a common indicator of organizational health.
The Harver cultural fit assessment is not designed to be a stand-alone test. It works very well when combined with any of our different assessments to improve the overall validity of the results. Cultural fit is important, but so is ensuring that the person you hire is capable of doing the job you’re hiring them for.
