The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
When you interview with a company, everything looks great. The recruiter may be pleasant, the career opening may be your dream job, and a hefty compensation hike may await you. However, in a rush to join a new company, remember that a new company may have its share of problems which is not visible on the outside. If you cannot read the company culture accurately, your time in the new company may be a bad experience and could even end in you being fired from the job.
Hence let us look at some obvious signs of how you can spot the company’s culture well in advance.
1) Subcultures: Every company has a culture regarding how work gets done. Culture is not a fatuous and inane HR concept. Instead, it is a set of unwritten rules about employees, managers, and how work gets done in a team. Typically, a company’s culture is defined by the founders’ personalities. They select top leaders who are pretty much like them in their outlook, and those leaders pick the next line of managers. This selection process continues till you reach the manager who is interviewing you. Since many MNC companies are enormous, with thousands of employees, not every manager will meet the exact expectations of the founder. Individuals may define their own team subcultures and impose their ways of working. What does this mean for you? First, when you interview, watch out for the behavior of the hiring manager with a keen eye.
2) Company data: When you do your initial research on the company, try to find the attrition rates within the company and compare that with competitors. You can find this on annual reports, google searches, or Best Places to Work ranking lists. It may be a red signal if your target company has higher attrition than the industry average. You may also have to do your homework and look for other reasons, like recent layoffs and restructuring, to give you better context about recent attrition.
3) Talk to insiders: When you begin an interview process, use Linkedin to reach out to alums, friends, or extended family working in your target company. If you don’t have any network, you can cold connect with employees and ask for an informational session. Around 20% of people respond positively, so do not get disappointed with failure. If you try hard enough, somebody will talk to you and give you an honest opinion of the work culture in the company. Avoid interviewing without talking to insiders in advance. From an HR perspective, any conversation with company employees is an excellent sign. It speaks to your interest and enthusiasm for the company.
4) Talk to HR: I recommend you develop a circle of friends with the HR community. Have a friend in HR, either inside or outside the current company, you trust entirely. HR knows a lot of the insider news about companies, and their daily lives involve a lot of troubleshooting. Hence, they don’t always have a rosy view of scenarios and instead have a pragmatic idea of issues an employee could face. I have seen that all companies, whether food, telecom, big tech, or manufacturing, face the same HR problems. For an HR person, if you have seen it once, you have seen it all.
5) Hiring manager interview: While the company culture is amorphous, the behavior of the hiring manager is an accurate prediction of the team’s ways of working. The meetings with HR and recruiting are less predictive by nature.
6) Passion in the workplace: In companies that value their employees, employees think of being a part of something larger than themselves – the workplace or the wider community. The best employees always display a lot of infectious enthusiasm, so you can talk to them to understand what excites them. Some of the passion may come from initiatives outside work.
Similarly, either by online research or talking to employees, get a sense of the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. For example, if the company has no role in corporate social responsibility projects, that could indicate that the company doesn’t invest time in building long-term relationships.
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