Put up or shut up: The art of recruitment

I was interviewing an interesting man the other day. He’d come from one of the big consultancies, via a telecommunications giant, into a job leading new projects at one of the most iconic packaged goods challengers out there. And I asked him how much of what is admired in small challengers could translate into a giant? How much may be genuinely replicated on a large-scale?

He was very clear. People see and talk about how wonderful our brand is, he said, but the
brand is only responsible for 30 per cent of our success. The rest is culture. I could never take the brand elements into a giant, he continued, but here is what I would do: I would get very clear on the vision, very clear on values - and then I wouldn’t just enforce them, I would recruit by them. If someone’s attitude didn’t fit the values before they came, I wouldn’t accept them, he concluded.

Most of the companies we work in pay lipservice to culture. Oh, they have values - and
they make those values explicit. We, as leaders and managers, dutifully repeat them. But do they really impact what we do? No. Because while we say we expect people to adhere to them, we are not genuinely making them a key part of how we review people, and we are not recruiting by them.

Why? Because business results trump everything: as long as an individual is delivering results or a potential new hire looks like they will, we quietly forget about the importance of culture.

The really successful challenger brands and companies recruit for attitude and values and teach everything else. They believe a united team of B quality people playing with passion and cohesion will beat a bunch of dysfunctional A quality egos every time.

So those values we are so proud of? Let’s either put them up and recruit to them, or just don’t bother putting them up there at all.

This article was originally published in the November 2010 issue of Campaign Asia-Pacific.