Today’s candidate-driven market presents a litany of challenges for healthcare organizations. Top talent is harder to find, more expensive to hire, and more rigorous to retain than ever before.
Rising to the forefront of hiring imperatives during the modern-day “War on Talent” is the absolute necessity of hiring candidates that fully align with an organization’s unique culture and value. Being able to properly define, articulate, and promote your company’s culture, and then reliably assessing candidates that share or believe in those values, can be one of your more powerful recruitment tools.
Below, we’ll share some insight on why organizational fit is so important for healthcare organizations, and provide some tips on how to get it right.
Why It’s So Important to Get the Culture Fit Right
It’s no secret that hiring and onboarding expenses quickly pile up, especially for executive-level hires where the search process can easily eclipse six months. These costs count doubly for organizations who (finally) acquire a high-level candidate, only to have them phase out relatively quickly because they didn’t align well with the overall company culture.
Not only does this bring you back to square one (and all that money, time, and energy wasted), turnover, especially of higher-level employees, trickles down through the rest of the workforce and damages morale, productivity, and momentum.
Getting the culture fit right with a new hire maximizes your chances of retaining an employee and minimizes your chances of recommitting the time, energy, and resources into another search—and if you’ve already experienced turnover due to a poor culture fit, you’re likely at risk of this scenario playing out all over again.
It may sound a little fluffy or ephemeral, but there is hard data that reinforces the power of company culture. Thriving employees are three times more likely to work for a company with a strong sense of purpose than those that don’t, according to Mercer’s recent Global Talent Trends Study.
Understanding what your own company’s personality, beliefs, vision, and goals are and developing a proven method to suss out suitability among potential hires can pay enormous dividends for your organization’s long-term growth.
So, how can you do it?
How to Get the Culture Fit Right
It may seem an obvious first step, but truly understanding or establishing the beliefs, values, attitudes, and goals that make working for your organization unique is imperative if you wish to find like-minded talent who are suited to stick around for the long haul. Far too often companies fail to understand, or they only think they understand, their culture and are therefore ineffective in promoting it and acquiring ideal candidates.
Devote some real, intentional time among your leadership (and other staff if feasible) to dig into the shared identity and beliefs that contribute to your culture. Examine your existing core values and determine if they accurately represent the current sentiment among your employees.
Remember, culture is fluid and can change over time as a company grows and evolves. If you feel you have a solid understanding of your culture, it’s still beneficial to reevaluate from time to time to see what needs adjusting. Not only does this help energize and retain your current staff, but being able to strongly explain and “sell” your organization’s values and purpose can be an immense advantage in the recruiting process.
Once you reach a consensus, it’s time to then build a strategy into your hiring process that can reliably identify candidates that would be an exceptional fit.
Partner With an Executive Search Firm
Enlisting the help of a specialized, experienced search firm can also be a huge advantage in the effort to identify the candidates your business needs to thrive and, even more importantly, they can ensure they’re suited to be a long-term fit.
At Quick Leonard Kieffer (QLK), we’ve been helping top healthcare organizations nationwide find and retain the leaders that make a difference. Our team of seasoned recruiters has the industry expertise and curated pool of candidates necessary to overcome whatever hiring challenge our client’s face.
Get in touch with us today to learn how we’ll do it for you.
