Expressing Company Culture During the Hiring Process to Ensure the Perfect Executive Hire

Effective executive recruiting is one of the most complex and crucial activities that a company can engage in—the right or wrong executive hire can have a massive impact on overall ROI. For such pivotal positions, even the smallest of mistakes during the hiring process can lead to a mediocre hire, which can have disastrous consequences.

One common mistake is failing to successfully express your company’s culture when seeking applicants for the C-suite. Culture fit is a vital metric because the right skills, but the wrong attitude can do a lot of harm to a team, and to productivity. It’s also very difficult to evaluate a candidate’s culture fit, which is why you should contract with an executive recruiter with industry expertise to get the job done right.

The All-Important Position Description

In this extremely competitive job market, the process of finding and hiring STAR talent into leadership positions—particularly for critical and specialized fields like digital marketing, ecommerce, and data science—must be optimized from the beginning. That requires a position description that successfully expresses your company’s culture in addition to the duties and expectations of the role. The right description of culture will attract the right kind of candidate, and assist all parties in understanding your unique environment and needs.

Partnering with specialist executive digital marketing or data science recruiters means you have access to a team of experts who will help identify the key aspects of your company culture and express them to candidates. The best recruiting firms will have decades of insider industry expertise and experience, an invaluable asset on its own. They also have a virtue that no business they’re partnered with can match—objective outsider perspective. Once they’ve helped you identify those key cultural requirements, they can better tailor the candidate search to your expectations.

Culture Expression, Culture Fit, Soft Skills

Formulating a job description that thoroughly explains a position’s requirements, responsibilities, and expectations is necessary to clarify for both the employer and candidate what hard skills the role requires. Soft skills can be much harder to identify, explain, and evaluate in candidates. That’s often one area where an experienced executive recruitment partner can add invaluable support to the recruitment process, as the best will have dedicated experts on hand to help you craft thorough, thoughtful position descriptions.

Why Culture Fit and Soft Skills?

When an organization is hiring a VP of ecommerce , for instance, it’s absolutely imperative that the ecommerce recruitment team has a crystal-clear picture of company culture. That allows them to better ensure culture fit when selecting candidates, and culture fit relies on soft skills. Finding candidates with applicable job experience is straightforward. Identifying those with the soft skills such as emotional intelligence, facility for communication, problem solving, flexibility, critical analysis, and other difficult to teach attributes, requires a lot of experience. They can’t be gleaned easily from a resume, so you’ll need the expertise and insight of professional recruiters to properly source and evaluate STAR talent.

Why Company Culture Matters

Hard skills can be taught. A candidate with the necessary soft skills will have the focus and flexibility needed to learn the gaps in their hard skill sets. They’ll also have the emotional intelligence required to understand the company culture, get along with their coworkers and employees, and motivate their teams. Those candidates are STAR talent and they are always highly sought after.

To an internal hiring team with less experience than professional recruiters, a candidate with decades of related experience would likely seem like the perfect fit. What about their work ethic, however? How have their soft skills impacted their performance and how do they lead a team? A recruiter’s objective understanding of the company culture may result in recognizing the candidate as a terrible culture fit, as not having the right soft skills and work ethic, or just not having truly relatable experience. A lot of that comes down to how well you express your company culture, and what you truly desire in the soft skills of a candidate.

About BrainWorks

For the past 28 years, BrainWorks has cultivated a reputation as an innovator and leader in the executive and C-level recruiting industry. That success is due to their unique combination of proprietary recruitment processes, extensive professional networks, and an abundance of experience in a variety of industries. Their recruiting strategy leverages tools that include the Talent Evaluation Process (TEP), the Seven Traits to Assess Results (STAR) system, and the Talent Acquisition Profile (TAP), with the experience and expertise of their recruitment experts. Their expertise keeps BrainWorks a cut above as executive ecommerce and CPG recruiters. Their Practice Areas additionally include Data Science, Finance, CRM, IT, Digital Marketing, Private Equity, and Analytics. They have decades of experience in analytic recruiting—completing successful hires for major CPG companies nationwide. Browse all open positions.