How to Communicate Workplace Culture in Your Recruitment Process

To communicate workplace culture in your recruitment process, show it at every stage: be specific about your environment in the job ad, use screening to see personality, discuss culture openly in interviews, and ask reference checks about how the candidate works with others. Doing this consistently helps the right candidates opt in and the wrong ones opt out.

Cultural fit is one of the biggest factors in the success of a new hire, for both the candidate and the employer. If a candidate doesn’t fit the culture, it’s likely they will quickly become unhappy and disengaged, and then no one wins.

Candidates used to get a sense of your culture by visiting the office for an interview. With many roles now recruited partly or entirely over video, that doesn’t always happen, so it pays to give candidates a clear picture of your culture before they even apply. Here is our guide to communicating workplace culture at every stage of your recruitment process.

How do you show culture in a job ad?

This is your first chance to communicate with prospective employees, so make use of it to share information about your culture. It will help people make an informed decision as to whether they should apply, so you get a more engaged candidate pool.

Many job ads allude to cultural elements with adjectives like busy, fast-paced, or flexible, but it can also pay to be a little more specific.

Tell candidates what makes your environment this way.

If it’s flexible, explain how - i.e., with opportunities to work flexible hours or work from home. And most importantly, make sure the adjectives you choose are accurate. Calling a workplace ‘fun’ or ‘flexible’ might attract the most candidates, but if it’s not true, they aren’t the right ones.

How can screening reveal cultural fit?

Video pre-screening tools that allow you to send a one-way video interview to the candidate can be a great way to see a candidate’s personality and gain insights that are simply not possible from a written resume. To use this to best effect, ask some curveball questions that get a candidate thinking on their feet and their personality shining through.

How do you discuss culture in an interview?

In a face-to-face interview, candidates pick up your culture through cues such as how people act, talk and dress in your office. On video, you need to be more upfront and discuss these things with the candidate directly.

Video interviews are also a good opportunity to get a feel for how the candidate thinks about the role: how well they have prepared, the questions they ask and how they engage with the conversation.

Whether your interview is face-to-face or online, it’s important to ask questions that both help your candidate understand your culture and allow you to explore their fit. Beyond the “tell me about a time you have worked in a fast-paced environment” type of question, ask questions that dig into who the candidate is. You can find out a lot about a candidate from what they like to do outside work, books they are reading etc.

A lot of cultural fit comes down to personality and so it’s important to understand who the person is beyond their career experience.

What should reference checks ask about culture?

Reference checks can give you insight into not just a candidate’s experience but their personality as well. Online reference checking tools such as Referoo make it easy to send consistent questions and keep the responses against the candidate record. Think outside the box when it comes to your reference checks and take them beyond the expected by also asking questions that get to the heart of who the candidate is. For example, “when have you seen the candidate at their happiest?” or even broad questions like “Why should I give the role to the candidate?”, which can often give you a range of insights.

Why culture matters at every stage

In most cases, the old adage

hire for culture, train for skills

remains true whether you are working in a face-to-face or remote environment. Get it wrong, and you may have to go back to recruiting. This is an expensive and time-consuming do-over, so it pays to be upfront about culture at every stage of your recruitment process.