How Company Culture Impacts Hiring + 3 Ways to Leverage It

Imagine this: you’re a job seeker sending applications to two companies that are similar in size and industry.

When you submit your application to Company A, you receive a generic, automated message with no sense of the company’s values. However, when you apply to Company B, you receive a warm welcome message after submitting your application, complete with links to the company’s “Working at Company B” page and an invitation to speak with someone in your prospective department.

If you choose to pursue Company B due to its commitment to candidate experience, you’d be like the other 77% of job applicants who evaluate and value a company’s culture during the application process.

In this guide, we will examine how company culture impacts recruitment and how your organization can enhance its culture to improve hiring outcomes.

How Company Culture Impacts Hiring

Culture influences every part of your company’s day-to day operations, including talent acquisition. They interact in the following ways:

Company culture intrinsically impacts recruitment marketing. Effective recruitment marketing materials are essential for streamlining the hiring process. According to Lever’s guide to recruitment marketing, the most effective employer brands authentically reflect the company’s culture.
Company culture shapes talent pools. Most job seekers conduct deep research into potential companies they might work for, looking for insights into the company’s culture and values. Therefore, companies naturally attract candidates who align with their company culture.
Cultural fit yields better retention rates. Recruiters track metrics to refine their efforts over time, and employee retention rates are an essential data point to measure efficiency. Employees who feel they fit well into the company culture will likely stay longer at the business.
A positive company culture promotes employee engagement. While company culture looks different for every organization, a supportive environment that emphasizes professional growth, wellness, and appreciation is more likely to engage employees and foster loyalty.

Now that you understand how company culture affects hiring, let’s examine how you can strategically leverage it to improve hiring outcomes.

Best Practices for Leveraging Company Culture while Hiring

1. Define and Communicate Core Values

Candidates can only get a good sense of your company culture if your marketing messaging is consistent across all communication channels. Collaborate with your team to answer the following questions:

What is our company’s mission?
What are our company’s core values?
How do these values manifest in daily operations and the hiring process?
What are three words to describe our company culture?
What does the candidate journey look like for our business?

Once you put all of these answers together, you can create a unique strategy for displaying your company culture throughout the hiring process.

However, it’s important to work with multiple stakeholders to get a variety of perspectives. For instance, let’s say you’re hiring for the IT department. Ensure you leverage points of view from IT professionals across the business, both in entry-level and managerial roles. This way, candidates will receive a well-rounded view of the department and the company as a whole.

2. Incorporate Company Culture Into the Candidate Experience

The best way for candidates to understand your company culture is by experiencing it firsthand from the very first touchpoint. Let your company culture lead the application process and candidate experience as a whole.

For example, companies that prioritize the following values may incorporate them into the hiring process in the following ways:

Transparency: Create job descriptions that clearly outline role responsibilities, compensation, benefits, company culture, work environment, and more.
Wellness: Acknowledge that applying for a job can be extremely stressful. Build provisions into the process to reduce stress, such as more relaxed “coffee chats” with employees, instead of relying solely on high-pressure interviews with leadership.
Holistic skills and professional development: Consider more than just a candidate’s resume. Integrate holistic skills assessments into the recruitment process to emphasize the importance of a well-rounded skill set, including soft skills.
Inclusion: Invite everyone, regardless of background, into your hiring process and use inclusive language in your job descriptions and other hiring materials.
Collaboration: Involve more than just the recruitment and HR teams in hiring. Invite department leads to participate in interview panels for the open role.
Appreciation: Show gratitude for candidates throughout the hiring process, from sending an automated email thanking them for completing an application to sending personalized messages after an interview thanking them for their time.

When assessing your company’s candidate experience, seek employee feedback about how the process could be improved or more closely aligned with company culture.

3. Leverage Technology

Ensuring your team has the best tools in its stack empowers you to implement company culture into the hiring process more effectively. For instance, you might use these types of software:

Applicant tracking system (ATS): A purpose-built ATS can greatly streamline the hiring process without sacrificing the human touch. Jobvite suggests seeking a system with candidate segmentation and customizable marketing features to ensure every message resonates with your candidates while reflecting your company culture.
Video interviewing platforms: Remote hiring is more prevalent now than ever, presenting recruiters with the challenge of effectively conveying company culture from a distance. Leverage video interviewing platforms to better express your culture during the hiring process.
Employee referral software: Referrals allow companies to involve their employees more directly in the hiring process. They can recommend candidates who might be a good fit and align well with the company culture.

Ensure your team uses tools that can work with each other seamlessly via integrations to preserve data across disparate systems.