Author: Buddhi Jayatilleke, Chief Data Scientist, Sapia.ai
We all know the value of company culture. Culture forms the shared values, beliefs, and practices that shape the behaviors and interactions of employees within an organization. It is like the collective personality of a company that shapes everything from employee satisfaction to customer experiences.
While culture is a collective outcome, it isn’t something that just happens automatically. Leaders are responsible for defining the underlying values and must remain intentional about sustaining the desired organizational culture. A key part of culture is who you hire and how you hire them. We hear phrases like “Culture Fit” and “Culture Add” in the hiring process. These are part of “who” you hire and are used to both accept and reject candidates. But “how” you hire reflects your culture and creates the virtuous (or vicious) cycle that amplifies (or derails) an organizational culture.
“If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” – Simon Sinek
The above quote, attributed to Simon Sinek, makes a great point, but how do you find people “who believe what you believe”? In other words, how do you attract and hire individuals who will thrive in and uplift your culture? The experience through the candidate’s journey plays a key role.
And today we have a new enabler. Artificial Intelligence (AI).
AI certainly can not create culture. Culture is innately a human construct. However, AI as a tool can help sustain, project, and amplify culture through effective engagement with employees and candidates. From job description writing to employee coaching, new generative AI tools, built on ethical principles, can help organizations instill their culture through sourcing to onboarding.
Here I highlight four key steps that leaders should pay attention to for building the right “hiring culture” and how AI can help. Due to my own experience in the selection process, more emphasis is placed there, but all 4 steps are equally important.
1. First Impressions Matter: The Job Description and Career Site
The job description is often the first interaction potential employees have with your organization. The language used, the values highlighted, and even the requirements listed can say a lot about your culture. For instance, emphasizing teamwork and collaboration suggests a culture valuing collective success over individual achievements. Using gender-neutral language can help attract a candidate pool that is gender diverse. These indicators give candidates an upfront understanding of what you prioritize and allow them to self-select based on fit.
Companies can enhance this first impression by providing more interactive means to get to know the organization rather than using static career websites filled with a lot of content. While some organizations do a great job in structuring the content and including more engaging content such as videos from existing employees, FAQ’s etc, these approaches fail to address questions a potential applicant might have in a timely manner. In a high-volume recruitment scenario, it is impossible to have human recruiters answer thousands of questions via phone or text chat.
This is where smart chatbots built on top of generative AI like Sapia.ai‘s Phai, a careers site assistant, can help. Phai can ingest all the relevant content on a website (or other sources) and then provide fast personalized responses to candidate queries, 24/. Phai not only enhances the experience but also increases the chances of a candidate completing the application process. Chat with Phai yourself by clicking the blue icon in the bottom right of your browser.
2. The Selection Process: What You Value in Candidates
The selection criteria and the selection process are reflections of what the organization values. Prioritizing skills over experience may indicate a culture that values continuous learning and potential. An interview is a common step in the selection process and most of the time it is unstructured and fraught with bias. We can all fall victim to various unconscious biases at this stage (and sometimes practice conscious ones too, unfortunately). As an example, here are 4 common ones that I have noticed in fast-paced growth environments like startups:
- Urgency bias: Rushed decisions to prioritize immediate needs over long-term goals when making hiring decisions. (We need to fill this role this week!)
- Confirmation bias: The tendency to interpret or favor information that confirms one’s preconceptions and ignore other relevant details. (This candidate comes from ABC Inc. They must be good!)
- Halo effect: Tendency to base an overall impression of a candidate on one positive trait or experience. (Wow! Their presentation slides looked amazing!)
- Dunning-Kruger effect: Individuals with limited skills or experience might overestimate their abilities in an interview and this overconfidence can sometimes be persuasive. Leaders who are inexperienced in a specific subject matter, for example, a non-technical founder who is recruiting an engineering manager, can be susceptible to this bias.
One way you can interrupt these human biases is to include an AI assistant in the process. This is where tools like Sapia.ai’s Chat Interview™ can help. Chat Interview™ conducts a chat-based structured interview that is scored by AI. Structured interviews are found to be high in validity and low in bias among the many options available to assess candidates. Hiring managers get access to a detailed report called Talent Insights (Ti) that can challenge some of their biased views and help them make better hiring decisions. For instance, independent research conducted using the Sapia.ai Chat Interview™ found a 36% reduction in the gender gap relative to recruitment without AI. One of the practices the Sapia.ai Chat Interview™ encourages is asking value-based interview questions to gauge alignment with company values. For example “Could you tell me about a time when you went above and beyond to help a team member at work?”.
3. Onboarding: The Introduction to Culture
The onboarding process is a critical stage for instilling organizational culture in new hires. Effective onboarding programs that align new employees with organizational values and expected behaviors can have a lasting impact on their integration and success within the company. As more companies become distributed and rely on remote work, part of company culture can be collaborating effectively over tools like wikis, and messaging apps like Slack and email. This requires making sure a new hire knows how to use these tools well and content norms specific to the company. This also brings to light the importance of “connection” as part of building culture, as in a remote work environment you have to be more intentional in building connections than when working together in an office. You can read more on this in “HR for the world of tomorrow“ where we discuss the changing landscape of work and how smart chat is the new medium for building connections.
4. Feedback and Continuous Improvement: Sustaining the Culture
How feedback is provided during the hiring process and the onboarding period can also be a cultural indicator. A culture that values growth and development is likely to provide constructive feedback to candidates (whether they are hired or not) and to new employees in an effective manner. This is the philosophy that Sapia.ai Chat Interview™ follows with My Insights, a feedback email every candidate gets after completing the chat interview that includes personality insights and coaching tips. The Sapia.ai Talent Insights report provides similar insights to the hiring managers that help them prepare for onboarding a new hire.
In essence, every aspect of the hiring process – from the job description to the final decision – is a reflection of your organizational culture. By being mindful of this, organizations can ensure they not only attract the right talent but also reinforce the culture they aspire to maintain and develop. AI can be used as a tool to mitigate biases, form a consistent process, and enhance the candidate experience to better reflect the company culture.
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