Bringing culture into the recruitment and hiring process is the best way to ingrain it throughout an organization. But, how do you accomplish this in a thoughtful way? As the former chief talent officer of Netflix Patty McCord wrote for Harvard Business Review, “Making great hires is about recognizing great matches.”
Across hundreds of interviews with chief people officers, one of the best examples I’ve seen of “making great hires” is at 10x Genomics. The key strategy? Showing candidates a realistic depiction of company culture to give them the opportunity to self-select. Candidates receive a five-page cultural document that describes the company’s cultural ecosystem, including nitty-gritty details such as “10x is a really intense place to work. We move really quickly, we work really hard, and we do that because for every moment we lose, there are lives lost as we pursue our ambitious mission.”