You Will Know the Right Candidate When You Know Yourself

There’s one approach to finding your next top legal talent that works every time: awareness of your core values and working with an executive search firm who respects them. 

Culture can be a complex concept. Nosce te ipsum (know thyself) is a great place to start. W. Somerset Maugham said this about culture: “You can know them only if you are them.” Merriam-Webster looks at culture through a corporate lens as “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.” The first step then is to do a self-assessment and understand your own corporate culture. 

A simple organizational assessment can be done by using The University of Michigan’s Organizational Cultural Assessment Instrument (OCAI). The OCAI uses a Competing Values Framework Model which has been used by over 10,000 companies worldwide to identify where companies fall in the matrix of four cultural types: (1) The Clan Culture, (2) The Adhocracy Culture, (3) The Market Culture, and (4) The Hierarchy Culture. Another approach to organizational assessment is one used by Harvard Business Review. (Click here for a quick & informative video tutorial.) 

This information matters because: 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success, while 83% of executives and 84% of employees rank having engaged and motivated employees as the top factor that substantially contributes to a company's success. 

If my years in the executive search sector have taught me one thing, it’s that in order to attract and retain top talent the values of the company must match the values of the candidates who they are wishing to attract. A company’s values are the bedrock that defines them. Wider culture is driven by multiple forces, but your company culture only has two: how your clients expect you to behave and how you enforce that performance within your company. Every firm, company or law department should be asking themselves what kind of culture they’re looking to promote and this will guide their hiring decisions. 

Indeed, Harvard Business Review concurred, “Cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group. When properly aligned with personal values, drives, and needs, culture can unleash tremendous amounts of energy toward a shared purpose and foster an organization’s capacity to thrive.” Basically, it boils down to this: success with your next hire begins with knowing who your firm is on the inside. Importantly, interview questions should seek to explore beyond work experience, behaviors, and interpersonal skills. Questions need to explore values. 

If a new hire’s core values align with your own, then working with your firm is going to be more than a job to them. It becomes a role they believe in and not just a check they cash. This leads to the kind of employee satisfaction and performance which avoids one of the most crippling conditions of the modern workplace: employee disengagement. 

The search for that legal unicorn can be exhaustive and consume your time and resources. Partnering with a legal executive search team that invests the time in learning about your company culture and values and that of the candidates will help you find that perfect fit again and again. Not only does this save time, money and headaches in the search process, but it can lead to greater employee satisfaction and retention. 

Yes, culture can be a tricky concept but meeting the right hire needn’t be. Reach out to me and my team to discover how passionate we are about finding that perfect hire. 

Carrington Legal Search is devoted to finding the ideal candidates for our clients’ recruitment needs. We have particular expertise in the Financial Services (banking, insurance, investment management, etc.) and Technology verticals. To make our nationwide network work for you, get in touch at 512-627-7467 or email carrie@carringtonlegal.com