Innovation or corporate culture – What’s more important for a staffing and recruiting professional to focus on?

For staffing and recruiting professionals, sometimes it takes the right blend of marketing talent to attract strong workers for an opening. For example, the passive job seeker is someone who is currently employed, but is open to new, better opportunities. Often these professionals feature desirable skills and have the ideal qualities for positions you are trying to fill for clients, which is why you should be actively seeking them out and storing their credentials and contact data in your staffing software database. However, how are you going to attract them from their current employers?

To pique the interest of an employed worker for a new position, you have to use your marketing skills to create an image of a desirable place to work. This raises the question of whether corporate culture or innovation is more attractive to a worker.

Some staffing professionals and managers believe that corporate culture [“the organization’s self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking and believing”] is a key way to ensure a productive working environment for an individual. ERE reported that “culture fit” is increasingly becoming the buzz topic and is all the rage in talent acquisition departments. The question that arises is: should the hiring process for a business place more weight on a persons’ cultural fitness or their professional capabilities? Having the same tastes, likes, and dislikes may be great amongst coworkers, but is hardly necessary to productivity. The same applies to office cultures that are more formal or informal. While an informal worker may feel more comfortable in a relaxed environment, he or she should not be hindered by working in a traditional corporate office.

As a result, some staffing professionals are doubting the importance of culture fit theories. This is in despite of other organizations that thrive and promote the corporate culture experience in their office like Google, HubSpot and Zoots. While all of these organizations have demonstrated innovation, their culture may not be the key to that success.

In contrast, many recruiters believe selling a job seeker on the opportunity to be an innovator in a business known for innovation is more important to attract them to the negotiations table. Working in a corporate environment that supports innovation is more crucial than staying in a positive corporate culture that may have a stagnate approach to change.

Innovative companies don’t rely on what they know and what they have done before. Instead, innovative companies are open to change and support suggestions. For go-getter professionals, this focus on innovation could be even more important than the overall corporate culture of a business and attract them to apply and stay in a position a recruiter is trying to fill.