I love the East Coast.
Vestcom’s second annual sales meeting was held in Boston just a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t have been happier about the location.
My family and I lived out east for over 15 years. I have an instinctual bond with the city: the surging energy, the historical pride, the cobblestone streets whose buildings line its edges offering some sort of eatery, shop or retailer (I even bought my iPad there). My blood starts pumping and my brain starts churning in places such as Boston.
I think when you hire people for your company, you want to look for a similar reaction in them. You want people to walk your halls feeling as though they should have been there all along, their professional juices boiling just thinking about the solutions they could impart.
What makes Vestcom successful is not our value proposition; it’s our people. Author Jim Collins highlights this notion in one of my favorite books, his best-seller, “Good to Great”:
“We expected to find that the first step in taking a company from good to great would be to set a new direction, a new vision and strategy for the company, and then to get people committed and aligned behind that new direction.
We found something quite the opposite.
The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.”
When our hiring managers look to fill a position, we start by identifying candidates who possess the technical skills and experience required of our open positions. When we interview, we dig deeper into the makeup of an individual to see how well a candidate will fit into our culture, or “onto our bus.”
My answer to the question “Do you hire for skill or culture fit?” is both. But in my experience, when it comes down to that final hiring decision, culture fit trumps.
