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Five Tips To Enhance Your Company's Value Proposition By Defining Your Core Values

Forbes Human Resources Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Karen Rice

In a tight labor market – especially in fields that rely on highly qualified workers – recruiters are often searching for passive candidates who may already be employed elsewhere and not even thinking about changing jobs. Even those passive candidates who are considering changing jobs are likely receiving simultaneous competitive offers. One of the best ways to attract passive candidates to your business is by presenting a strong value proposition that goes beyond salary, benefits and work schedule. Ultimately, your company’s core values are your most unique and valuable assets. 

Your company’s core values are its constitutional anchors. They are the foundation on which you build your business model and your essential rubric for hiring the right team. Too many companies neglect to practice or even define their core values. But if you don’t define your core values, they will be defined for you. It’s never too late to take the reins, establish your core values and begin instilling them in your team. Doing so will create an authentic, unified work environment that benefits your current employees and stands out to new candidates.

Here are five tips for defining your company’s core values and harnessing them to make the best hires. 

 1. Remember that core values don’t change. 

If your core values are constantly changing, then they aren’t your core values. Companies have to be thoughtful about selecting their core values up front, because changing them not only undermines the significance of individual values; it weakens the significance of having any core values at all. Choosing your core values isn’t a matter of picking qualities that sound good. It’s about mining those aspects of your company culture that are already deeply ingrained, polishing them and showing them off.    

 2. Establish the right number of core values.

Limiting your company’s core values to between three and six helps you home in on what truly matters and consistently emphasize those ideals. Core values should be simple, comprehensive, and applicable to most scenarios. This way, they’re easier to remember and more likely to become recognizable facets of every employee and customer interaction. 

 3. Make sure every employee knows your core values.

Every employee should know and consistently practice your core values so that your company culture is saturated with the principles that matter most. Bring core values up at every team meeting. Incorporate them into discussions about strategy, performance management, etc. It might seem like a good idea to create an acronym to help employees remember core values, but acronyms might actually make core values easier to forget because they reduce words to letters instead of elevating words to actionable ideas. 

 4. Emphasize core values in interview training.

Interviewing is a skill, and yet so many companies don’t invest in teaching their interviewers how to interview. However, your company needs the strongest interviewers to hire the strongest candidates. Core values should be at the forefront of interview training, so they are effectively communicated during interviews. It’s important for interviewers not to simply list core values as a sales pitch to candidates, however. Part of learning how to conduct a great interview is learning how to embody your company’s core values and effortlessly, organically incorporate them in your conversations with job candidates.  

It is equally critical to assess each candidate against your core values and make sure that an individual is going to be a culture addition and not just a culture fit. Often, your company’s ideal candidate isn’t simply aligned with your core values; they live and breathe those core values as the foundation for making meaningful changes and cultivating measurable benefits for your company. Utilizing core values in the hiring process helps ensure new employees are true assets. 

 5. Ensure that your core values live through your employee lifecycle.

Candidates can feel the appeal of working for your company when your interviewer moves and speaks with genuine enthusiasm for your organization’s core values. Ultimately, candidates are looking for a job they love. In today’s increasingly technology-driven workforce, genuine human connection over shared values is invaluable. 

Ultimately, companies should weave their core values into all aspects of their lifecycle, from the job candidate experience onward. Likewise, business leaders should not only exude commitment to core values in everything they do; they should hire team members who exude that same commitment. After all, building an indelible business means more than just hiring employees – it means hiring owners.

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