Last week, we provided you with three tips on how to assess your candidates cultural fit by setting up a company’s cultural concept, assessing cultural fit in candidate pre-selection (negative selection) and in a final selection step (positive selection).

Today, we want to show you two examples of cultural fit assessment in a pre-recorded videointerview. Why? Because pre-recorded video interviews are a valid and meaningful tool to use for pre-screening and pre-selecting candidates. They enable you to check the quality of your candidates in an early step of the hiring process.

Cultural Fit in pre-selection = pre-recorded video interviews, Situational Judgement Tests or online questionnaires

In principle, there are different approaches in pre-selection for checking cultural fit. Questions from a personality test can specifically match objectives of the organisation to the candidate. Online Situational Judgement Tests can be offered for candidates to outline how they would behave in specific situations based on a few alternatives. Due to new research, however, Situational Judgement Tests have held against strong criticism that suggests answers can be faked.

So let’s focus on the video interview and keep the essentials in mind: the pre-recorded video interview ensures that

a) all candidates answer the same questions, which means it ensures equal opportunity for everyone and

b) all candidates are evaluated on the basis of an objective, pre-established standards.

What questions can you ask in a pre-recorded video interview?

Well, that depends on what your respective company culture actually looks like. Let’s take, for example, “hands-on-mentality” and “flexibility“. Both may be characteristics that make up a corporate culture. A good way to approach such criteria in a video interview is to confront – like in situational judgement tests – the candidate with a “real” work situation and to give them several possible answer they can choose from.

1) The situation should be clearly described and the “critical element” made visible for each candidate. There should be no room for misinterpretation.

2) Make it clear that there is not just one “right” answer/behaviour, but rather a range of “good” behaviours. The video interview makes this perfectly clear.

Example “Hands-On mentality”:

“Please imagine that your boss wants you to introduce a new marketing tool as quickly as possible. He is very excited about this new tool but you, unfortunately, have never heard about it before. What do you do? ”

Background information provided with this question: please note that there is no perfect answer to this question. There are several behaviours that are fitting for this situation — that’s why we are curious about how you would react!

First, you need to define what exactly “hands-on” means to your company. Good candidate responses would be: “I’m trying to get as much information as I can, I try the tool out and schedule a discussion with my boss to talk about it.
Or: “I will do some short and efficient research and discuss other possible tools with my supervisor, tools that would also make sense for us.
Depending on your corporate culture, one answer will be better than the other.

Example flexibility:

“When working in your new job at our company, you will get new tasks very quickly and organise yourself according to the priorities. (1) How have you dealt with such situations in the past? Please use a concrete example. (2) What was the outcome of the situation? (3) How did you feel?”

In this example, the main question is “How did you feel?” There is no right or wrong answer, but the responses of the candidates should be clear about whether they are really comfortable with new situations, whether they see them as a challenge and manage to deal with them efficiently.

As a result, we can say: You have to be sure about what a “good” candidate response actually is. If you don’t, you will not be able to evaluate the candidates’ answers objectively and select the one that fits most to your expectations of your company values. This, of course, applies to all selection methods, whether it is a video interview or face-to-face interview.

If you do know what a good candidate answer is, the pre-recorded video interview offers you the significant advantage that all candidates will be asked the same questions and every candidate answer will be assessed based on pre-defined criteria, which is invaluable for making valid selection decisions.

When it is time to make a final decision on whether “Candidate A is slightly more likely to match our corporate culture than candidate B”, we recommend checking this in a face-to-face interview. However, as we said before, it remains crucial to have a concrete idea of what a good candidate answer is in order to keep objectivity.

How do you assess if a candidate matches your company?
Do you have any questions concerning the examples above? I am looking forward to discussing with you!