What makes someone the right person for the job? Skills and experience are up there, but another factor might make or break your choice: values.
If you own or recruit for a veterinary practice, you can probably think of a few key things that the organisation prioritises. It might be social responsibility or providing reliable service. Values frequently guide hiring in care-focused industries like medicine as a way of finding candidates who will fit the organisation’s vision in the long term.
Values based recruitment is good for employees as well as employers, enabling job candidates to get a clear idea of whether your organisation’s values are compatible with theirs.
Advantages of values-based recruitment
With values-based recruitment, you’re more likely to get a candidate who’s a good fit for your culture and therefore build teams who are all on the same page.
Employees are happier when they work for an organisation that matches their own values and are surrounded by like-minded colleagues. This will boost your employee retention at a time when many practices are losing people.
People who are happy at work and feel valued tend to show more team spirit, be more productive, have less absenteeism and build stronger client relationships.
How to succeed at values-based recruitment
Values-based recruitment needs to be strategically built into every stage of the hiring process. Here are the steps you need to take:
Values mapping
Write down the values that are important to your organisation. If you’re not clear on these, think of the values you’d like to be associated with. Then write down how those might translate into daily behaviour on the job.
Job adverts
Make sure the values you’ve listed appear in your job ads and on your careers page, and make it clear how they’ll translate into the role itself.
Pre-employment assessments
Pre-employment assessments include interviews, skills tests, and any other method of assessing candidates. To identify your candidates’ values, consider personality tests, situational judgement tests, or even cognitive ability testing to assess values like problem-solving. However, don’t be too picky at this stage. Use these tests to rule out the least suitable candidates rather than to pick the best.
Values-based interview techniques
Values-based interviews can include both questions directly rooted in your organisational values and roleplay scenarios to help you assess how candidates would live out their values in real-life situations. In both cases, ask follow-up questions to get more information from the candidate, such as “What did you learn from this experience?” Asking for the reasoning behind candidates’ responses can help you understand their thought processes.
Creating a good values-based recruitment plan depends on your understanding of your own organisational values and goals. When you have a clear grasp of your organisation’s values, you can identify the people who are most aligned with them and most likely to love working with you.
