Good help is hard to find. If you are going to be intentional in your approach to developing a vibrant workplace culture, you must avoid hiring the wrong people for your company. Today’s workforce contains an abundance of highly-skilled individuals. But it takes more than just knowing how to do a job in order to build a productive, successful company. You need employees who see value in your company’s vision and mission. You need employees who embrace your company’s core values.

Find the Right Fit

Finding the right fit for a company’s culture is as important to that company’s success as the products or services the company sells. Allowing the culture to grow organically, without thinking about who you are hiring, will simply not do. Your employees must align with your company’s values. Your company’s vision and mission needs to inspire them. Inspired employees will not only fit well within your company’s existing work environment, but they will strengthen the workplace culture you wish to develop.

To help you find out if a job candidate will be the right fit for your company, you need to utilize resources that help you evaluate that job candidate’s behavioral traits. You need to shape the conversations you have with candidates that help you identify a valuable employee. This can obviously be a challenging endeavor, but in the end it’s a necessary component.

However, keep in mind that finding the right employee for your company is only half the battle. You must also provide reinforcement.

Provide Reinforcement

After you’ve found an employee that integrates well within your company, you now possess the challenge of keeping them. Having difficulty with employee retention remains a sticky situation. One of the biggest reasons why great employees leave is a lack of credibility in the leadership they serve. No one wants to work for a company who promises the moon, but falls flat on delivery.

A company whose core values lack credibility eventually give way to a toxic environment, so you must provide a structure where your core values are reinforced daily.  In doing so, you will not only inspire employees to be better, but you will succeed in building a productive workforce.