This section summarizes our research results from experiments connected to Talent Cloud’s performance objective on improving fit-to-team. (Because of close connections between “team culture fit” and diversity and inclusion, this section should be read in conjunction with Research Section 3 on improving hiring experiences and outcomes for equity-seeking groups.)
Here, you’ll find our research experiments, theory, and results on how to get to a high quality hire who works well with the team. This research views hiring as a continuum, where we look at influences and outcomes from the time of recruitment until 1-2 years after the initial hire is made.
To consider a hiring process successful, the employee has to do more than simply fit into a team. Success means that the team has found a strong, sustainable, high performing fit that merits the effort invested in the hiring process and, ultimately, the cost to Canadians.
The “fit-to-team” research shared here includes considerations such as rethinking the job advertisement as a recruitment tool, increasing the quality and number of top quality and qualified candidates per process, improving the culture fit as it pertains to onboarding speed (think of it as “pre-boarding”), and seeing how factors in recruitment impact the retention of talent on the team.
List of Experiments and Interventions
- Impact-Driven Staffing
- Five Factor Match
- Case Study: Manager and Applicant Survey Responses
- Enabling Remote Work
- Why Flexibility and Authenticity Matter
- Testing Self-Assessment of Skills by Level
One of the most significant differences between Talent Cloud and the standard GC hiring practices is the extent to which Talent Cloud focuses on the individual human to team fit. That requires that we consider a lot more than just how well a person’s experience matches a list of experience requirements (which is the standard 2 factor match: applicant to job.) To produce stronger hiring outcomes, we need to take into account how humans are human, even at work, and adjust our staffing practices accordingly.
Talent Cloud takes the approach that because you’re placing a person (an individual with a personality, perspectives and work styles) onto a team (many people with different personalities, perspectives and work styles) the extent to which they can successfully work together will be as important, if not more important, than the extent to which the person coming in can do the job itself. As a result, Talent Cloud operates on a 5 factor match: applicant, job, team culture, operating context and manager leadership style.
Job applications take time and energy, and for some people, that time and energy is in short supply. We want to be respectful of this reality for our applicants by making sure they have all the information they need when deciding if applying to a job on our platform is a good use of scarce personal resources. (Internally, the team refers to this as the “Friday night test” for feature development.)
Talent Cloud endeavours to provide maximum transparency to applicants, giving them details like how many other applications have already been received, whether or not flex hours and remote work are allowed, and what the manager’s leadership style is like. If someone has to be able to pick up their kids at 3pm everyday, there’s no reason they should have to go through a months-long job process, waiting until they’re actually offered the job, before they can get the answer to this most basic and useful of questions, “Can I get flex hours in the afternoons?” It’s a waste of everyone’s time, and it shows a disregard of applicants (soon to be employees).
So wherever we can, Talent Cloud tries to design staffing processes that work for humans… humans who have to cook dinner, care for others, do their laundry, and somewhere in there find a little time to themselves to think about what they want to do with their life in terms of career. We want Talent Cloud to be pleasant, easy, and emotionally fulfilling for those who invest their time and energy on our platform.
