How Do You Tell If A Job Candidate is Aligned With Your Values?

OK. It is easy for someone to fake that they “love” your core values during the hiring process. If you are a company that is passionate about your values, a good interviewer will figure this out pretty quickly and reciprocate that “passion” during the interview. So how do you really know?

Design questions to figure it out. Think about it. If “tenacity” is a trait that you require in a sales person, you will ask questions to determine if the candidate has the tenacity trait, right?

It’s the same thing with your core values.

Let me walk you through a few examples. “Find a Better Way” is one of our core values at Nurse Next Door. It means that you have to be open to new experiences, open to change, and always be searching for a better way to do things. In other words, it is a not a core value that everyone is comfortable with. So it is vital that we search for this during our interview process.

We ask questions like:  “What is  a work environment that you would be really uncomfortable in?” and “What would you change in the interview/recruiting process to make it more fun?”

Another ones of our core values is “Passionate About Making A Difference”  It means that you have to be inspired by helping; by helping people, by helping your community; by helping to make the world around you a better place to be. This is the easiest core value to “game” in our interview process. Everyone can conjure up a “grandma story” to convey how passionate they are about making a difference. (We hear this one so much that it is actually a red flag for me when I hear it!)

So how do we screen for this core value? We ask questions like “What other types of jobs have you been applying to?” and  “If all jobs paid the same, what would you do?”

But my favorite indicator of this core value is having a track record of volunteerism. We figure if a person is volunteering at anything in their community, that they are highly likely to align with this core value.

Finally, we ask a  few general “culture” questions, just to ensure that they will be a culture fit when they join us. Two questions I like to ask include  “What did you do in your last job to make the workplace more fun?” and “What is the most fun you have ever had while working?” Why these questions? Because I like to have fun when I work.

If you are not asking direct questions about your core values in the interview process, how do you know if the person you just hired will really live your core values? (We all know that hiring by gut works, at best, 50% of the time)