How Do I Know If a Candidate Will Fit In at My Company?

How do I know which personality types will be successful in my company? Sometimes when I'm looking at a resume, I feel like I'm comparing apples to oranges.

Poor fit with the corporate culture -- not

job performance -- is the most often cited reason for the termination of middle managers. The company's top brass generally screens senior managers to ensure a good culture fit. However, middle management hires are often poorly screened for culture fit, partly because department managers and staff screen their own candidates and tend not to seek input from other departments.

Behavioral and corporate culture assessment tools can often help remedy the problem. Tests that determine the compatibility of prospective employees and the hiring company's culture are gaining popularity and acceptance. Many companies are offering some type of assessment test to line managers and prospective employees as part of the hiring process.

Most of the personal diagnostic tools given to candidates measure character traits or personality type such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which assesses extroversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling and judging-perceiving. Cultural evaluation tools generally audit several members of an organization at once to gauge the business environment. The Organizational Values Inventory (OVI) is a common tool that rates cultural types within the following areas: integrative, innovative, caring, stable, results driven.

Typically, these tools do a good job of identifying the parameters of a company's culture, such as:

• Degree to which the company is hierarchical versus empowerment based
  
  
• Tendency of managers to be decisive in their decisions vs. flexible in their decision-making.
  
  
• Encouragement of managers to be rotated into new functional areas to help them grow versus tendency to keep managers only in the functional area they were hired into

With both measures in hand, the HR manager should be able to make a more informed and mutually acceptable hiring decision.