Getting the right people will be the best investment your organisation ever makes

I’ve read hundreds of job applications, interviewed 15 people and appointed three to our team at Community Directors in the past few months. At the same time, our work with Cranlana Ethics Centre has caused me to reflect on the contribution recruitment makes to the culture we welcome new staff into. Recruitment is one of the most powerful culture levers we have.

There is a necessary tension in recruitment between homogeneity (“cultural fit”) and diversity. Boards, executive teams, staff and volunteers all contribute to building culture in any organisation, person by person, skill by skill, attitude by attitude and value by value.

Personal characteristics we might assume fall into the bucket labelled “values” include things like voting preferences, dress codes, and how we signal our identity to others. But actually, those characteristics are more commonly expressions of beliefs and life experiences – and they might be short-lived.

For example, young people entering the job market today are typically less focused on the major political parties (or any political parties) than their parents or grandparents. If you employ someone on the basis that their progressive or conservative opinions are aligned with those of your organisation, you may be disappointed when their views shift or turn out to be “inconsistent”.

Employing for cultural fit should be more focused on attitudes and values related to work – after all, you’re employing somebody to work for you. Values can involve preferences as to how work gets done. For example, most workplaces tend towards being more rigid or more informal. If you don’t recognise this, you might end up recruiting a highly skilled and motivated person only to find that your workplace sucks the life out of them because your hierarchy is too rigid, or they suck the life out of your team because it prefers a level of fluidity that your new recruit can’t work with.

Similarly, if your organisation has little capacity to provide strong direction, then you will need recruits who love to initiate and self-direct. People who are easily overwhelmed and constantly need to be made to feel safe and supported will not be a good fit. On the flip side, someone who loves to work in an agile, innovative way will probably be ill-suited to an organisation that has found the “best” way to do things and wants to keep doing them just so.

Values such as justice and fairness operate at a different level from these work preferences. They are less about the day-to-day mechanics of how work gets done, and more about the standards to which organisations and individuals try to hold themselves. Taking values into account in HR and recruitment is complex because even when people agree on particular ideals, they can mean different things to different people.

For example, fairness and justice are commonly valued, but they can mean polar opposite things. To one person, fairness means everyone in the workplace gets access to an equal share of a professional development fund, while to another, fairness means the professional development fund is allocated according to seniority and experience.

Collaboration is a strong indicator of culture, often requiring curiosity and a willingness to ask questions. It relies on a level of trust, both that no one will step on your toes, and that work handed to you by others will be the right work. For some, collaborating means openly discussing and testing ideas in a room together. For others, it is quieter, more considered, and happens before or after the meeting.

Trust is critical in workplaces that are trying to solve problems together and prioritise the impact of the whole organisation over the short-term comfort of individuals who all want to feel they have got something right. That kind of environment depends on people being willing to question, to pause, and to say, have we thought about the unintended consequences? Are we missing something? Are we sticking to how we agreed to work?

The cost of just nodding and following along, and even complimenting a product or service that is moving in the wrong direction, is very high because the organisation may still suffer the consequences many years and a lot of dollars into the future. Think about something you built at work during the covid lockdowns, and ask yourself whether it was truly as good as it could have been without a collaborative approach.

Recruiting for diversity means looking at more than crude demographic data on a form, although of course this is important. Diversity of thought can come from different personality types, from extrovert to introvert and all the combinations in between. It can come from different ways of working and diverse skills such as being creative, playing games, or proficiency in mathematics, language or technology. Some people think aloud and others on paper. Recruiting for diversity of thought is protective to your organisation, ensuring it considers unintended consequences of decisions, fine details and big-picture visions.

Back to the interview room. What are we seeking? Ideally, not a mirror of ourselves and also not a complete wildcard. We need a balance of similarity and difference. This requires us to clearly understand our culture. Then, rather than asking, “Will this person fit?”, we might ask, “What conditions help this organisation do its best work, and can this person both thrive in, and contribute to, those conditions?” Similarly, when we start a new job or join a new board, we must consider how the existing team works as well as what it does.

To define culture, ask concrete questions. How do decisions get made when time is short? What does accountability look like on an ordinary day, not just in a crisis? And be honest about trade-offs. Every culture excludes as well as includes. A highly consultative workplace may frustrate people who want speed and clarity, but a tightly structured organisation may frustrate those who are energised by ambiguity.

For boards in particular, recruitment brings an added layer of responsibility. Board recruitment is not just about capability, it is about leadership in a different way. The people invited into governance roles shape not only decisions, but their tone, the questions that are asked, and those that go unasked.

When I am looking to appoint a new board member or new staff, I look for people who genuinely want to be with us because of who we are. They feel lucky to be part of our community, they love our organisation as much as we do, and they will spend their time bringing out the best in the organisation and their colleagues.

Recruitment needs the same focus and attention that we give to strategy and finance. I suggest avoiding trying to find people who simply “fit”, but being very deliberate about the culture the organisation’s people are creating together. At its heart, recruitment is about care for the work, for the people doing it and for the communities we serve. The people we bring in shape what we do, but they also shape how it feels to be part of it. When we get the balance right between alignment and difference we create environments where people can think at their best level, challenge each other constructively, and stay long enough to see the impact of their contribution.

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