What is meant by “fit” in Recruitment?
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
People often talk about finding the right “fit” in recruitment; but what do they mean?
The truth is, they often haven’t thought that through; if you push them, they may say that the successful candidate needs to fit:
The existing team;
The culture of the organisation;
The current strategy; or
The gap.
Fit is a positive word; when you buy expensive clothes you are looking for fabulous fit, so what is wrong with any of this? And the simple answer is “maybe nothing”. But there are questions to ask.
If you are looking for someone to fit the existing team, what do you mean? Another pair of hands that will fit in with how things are done and not rock the boat? That’s fine, as far as it goes; but why do you need another person to do the same things that are already being done? Is there not a process improvement that could produce the same result?
And of course, adding a new person who “fits the team” may have a negative impact: what if the issue is really that the members of the team are already too similar to one another; adding one more person who is also ‘just the same’, might make things worse.
What about fitting the culture of the organisation? It seems churlish to say so - especially as there are already more than enough organisations with a terrible culture - but just finding someone who fits your great company culture sounds a little too comfortable. Is this going to serve your customers, or just yourselves?
Finding someone who fits the strategy is also not perhaps as great as it sounds. Despite what Business School would like to teach you, strategies change with the weather (or at least with every major economic or political shock or change of leadership). Recruitment takes time: people hired for their fit with a strategy are normally so specifically skilled and equipped, that their face may no longer fit by the time they are onboarded.
Fitting the gap - the gap in the existing team, or in the culture, or in the strategy - may be a better option than the others. But even here there is still a “hmm” moment. Just think: a person who “represents” the gap - i.e. they are exactly what this team or organisation is missing - rarely finds enough common ground with the rest of the team or organisation to make things work. Yes, they are “everything we are not” - but that means also that “they will never be us…”
But there is a better way.
There is something you can check fit against, which will tend to give you coherence with team, culture and anything else that matters to you - but with much lower risk of suffering Attack of the Clones as a result. And that is Mission.
Mission is what the organisation exists for, and, specifically, the class of problem it exists to solve for its clients. That could be supplying and fitting great after-market exhausts for trucks, it could be providing vocational based training for school-leavers, or legal services for farmers, or pharmaceutical products for … whoever.
And if you ask the question, “does adding this person to our organisation (in this role now, and wherever else we put them in the future) increase or decrease our ability to deliver our mission to the delight of our customers, and to the profit of our stakeholders”, then you have a question which requires robust data and insight to answer, but which will also make the organisation more fit for purpose, not less.
Which is the ultimate purpose of hiring anyone.