Hiring? How to Make Sure Your New Candidate Is the Right Fit

When candidates are sending out resumes, writing cover letters and meeting for interviews they are often lying from the get-go, but not for the reasons you might think.

Bad managers are the number one reason people leave their jobs, but it never seems that way when you’re questioning someone on their reasons for seeking out a new role at a new company.

Why Employees Don’t Like Their Boss

There are a lot of reasons employees complain about their boss. Some may not be warranted, but some most assuredly are. Here are a few examples of typical bad bosses and their behaviors, as outlined by Fast Company. Have you experienced bosses like these in the workplace?

• The Overbearing Boss: This manager is almost a cliché. Using intimidation and force, the overbearing boss’s primary concern is maintaining power. They dominate meetings and bulldoze over other people and their ideas, just to get and keep control, usually in the name of efficiency. This manager can also be prone to micromanagement.
• The Unrealistic Boss: This manager may have their head in the clouds and have trouble delivering on their promises. As a result, they often come down harder on their direct reports by setting unreasonable expectations without providing the necessary support or information.
• The Indecisive Boss: Always hedging their bets, this manager never seems to be quite clear on what they expect, but still wants to hold you responsible for the outcome. Confusion is their modus operandi.
• The Boneheaded Boss: It’s a harsh reality, but this manager can best be described as incompetent. Perhaps they were promoted hastily or hired haphazardly and hold a position that is beyond their capabilities. Perhaps they simply have an ego the size of Milwaukee. But watch out… incompetence and the bad decisions it engenders takes no prisoners.

Complaints also surface when the boss isn’t categorically bad. They tend to come up when there isn’t a good culture fit. A bad match is almost a guaranteed disappointment and source of conflict, but it also affects the bottom line.

Culture fit doesn’t mean sameness, however. In fact, it has been shown that diverse teams often create the best culture for creativity and innovation. Culture fit simply means how each person’s uniqueness and point of view contributes to the building of a shared sense of satisfaction, vision and values.

So how can you be sure a new candidate will work well with a new boss?

While a candidate might look good on paper, how do you know if they are compatible with their potential new manager, or are a good culture fit? Even if a candidate admits they’re leaving their current job because of their boss, there has previously been no way of predicting if these same issues will come up again.

But that was the past. Recruiting is experiencing massive disruption from new technologies, namely a shift to embracing artificial intelligence (AI).

AI is moving quickly into virtually every area of our lives, and it’s only going to accelerate and become more widespread.

In the recruiting space, there are now a lot of tools out there that use big data analytics and the machine learning capabilities of AI to predict the likelihood of a good working relationship. To do this, the algorithm combs through a proprietary database containing attributes on everyone in the workforce – such as career length, likes and dislikes, interests, and other demographic data – and identifies which attributes are predictive of a winning or losing combination.

This is a vital piece of the recruitment puzzle because it ultimately helps you avoid the pains and costs of a poor culture fit – recruitment troubles that were the catalyst for why we started Candidate.Guru, and why we recently acquired Elevated Careers from the prominent dating site eHarmony, the worldwide leader in “matching” capabilities that are responsible for 438 marriages per day!

Culture is king, and finding the right solution to enable this can make or break a company in today’s market.

[This post first appeared on BusinessCollective, an initiative of Young Entrepreneur Council, which is a free virtual mentorship programme that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.]

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