Culture Fit & Remote Hiring: How We Do It

In the day and age of work from home, one might think that since we do not have to communicate face-to-face and share an office fridge with our colleagues, it is less important to hire for cultural fit. However, in this new and unprecedented era, it couldn’t be more crucial to make sure that your new employees communicate and work in a way that aligns with your company.

What is Culture Fit?

Culture fit describes the process of hiring an employee whose work practice aligns with your company’s values, work customs, and communication style. This includes everything from the size and distribution of the workforce in your organization to the degree of informal communication between colleagues. However, many recruiters go with their gut when hiring for culture fit. This, in turn is a risky endeavor as it falls under the influence of personal biases. In this article, we will look at ways to both successfully define and communicate your corporate culture while, in turn successfully recruit in line with culture fit practices.

Why is Culture Fit important for remote teams?

Hiring someone according to culture fit is seen to positively affect the productivity and the overall well-being of the team and its members. To some extent, this is self-evident, as anyone would work harder to bring a firm they believe in to a success. Obviously, this remains true for remote teams as well.

However, there are even more reasons to focus on culture fit in the age of work-from-home, one of them being communication. Indeed, remote employees are often less eager to communicate with each other informally as usual office chit-chat is simply taken out of the equation. Hiring for culture fit helps bring more like-minded individuals on board, ensuring a more comfortable environment for communication. This, in turn, is shown to increase productivity on both personal and team levels. In the end, hiring for culture fit is really about building a strong front of professionals with a shared idea of where your company is headed as well as a shared enthusiasm to get it there.

How to define and express your company’s culture

Now that we’ve covered the significance of considering culture fit in recruitment processes, it’s time to get to the practical part – determining your company’s culture and understanding how to express it. In order to define your company’s culture, it’s best to simply describe the way it functions right now. What kind of communication style is mostly used? How do the hierarchical relationships function? What values does the company hold on the whole? Innovation? Tradition?, Environmental awareness? Diversity? Punctuality? Which performance metrics matter the most? These are all important questions to ask and discuss with your colleagues (and don’t forget to write down the answers!).

It is crucial to express your company’s culture in a meaningful and systematic way even before a job interview with a candidate. After all, the first time potential employees interact with your company is likely to be through social media channels and the website. Conveying your company’s values through unique content on the website, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms is essential for the right candidates to be drawn to your brand in the first place and it’s important to make sure to put forward coherent messaging about your culture.

How to hire for culture fit when recruiting remotely

Understanding and describing your company’s culture is only half the battle. Now is the time to integrate it into the recruitment process. To determine whether a candidate is a culture fit for your company, it’s important to ask about their successes and failures, as well as things that make them proud, including questions such as why they left their previous job and why they chose their profession. It is also important to ask why they chose your company and whether the company’s goals resonate with their own worldview on a personal level. For each position (especially if your organization is rather big), consider also the smaller culture of each team. For example, this can mean the way tasks and results are communicated between the members of a team. And last but not least, be sure to ask the same set of questions in order to avoid a biased impression.

Our approach

At Coder Staffing we prioritize culture fit, providing our clients with top-notch developers that not only match all the technical requirements but are also able to easily join existing teams, complementing these team structures while ultimately strengthening the company itself. At the very beginning of any prospective cooperation, we discuss the values, goals, and working processes that exist in our client’s company and present them with candidates that fit them. Applying the extensive experience of matching Russian developers with foreign clients, we understand thoroughly the intricacies of intercultural communication and only offer the best-match candidates from our database. As we aim for long-term cooperation, our experienced team helps with the developer’s adaptation to the company. Indeed, over time most of our clients hire more than one developer, using our services. While we help to build these teams, we continue to put a strong focus on culture fit with our ultimate goal being a continuous partnership with our clients. Interviewing for culture fit in turn allows us to create sustainable teams that reliably deliver excellent results.