Are You a Culture Fit? There's an App for That

July 22, 2014 at 1:56 PM by Rob Stevenson

Looking at a candidate's work history, skills and qualifications, and getting references from previous employersScreen_Shot_2014-07-22_at_1.55.00_PM are all lay-ups when it comes to evaluating them for a role. Where things can really get tricky is when you start thinking about what it will be like to have that person in the office 5 days a week. It can be slippery to figure out exactly how someone's personality will effect the status quo, especially when they're on their best interview behavior. Likewise, it's equally difficult for a candidate to know for certain what your company culture is like and how they'll fit in. Enter Good.co.

Good.co has been offering personality quizzes in one form or another for over a year, with the initial intent of having users share their results with friends. I fired up the app and was prompted to answer a handful of "would you rather?" -esque questions (Win the lottery or win the Nobel prize, for example) and was assigned three personality types, accompanied and described by charming cartoon avatars of Steve Jobs, Conan O'Brien, and (appropriately) Kanye West.

Next, the user is prompted to select from a handful of other quizzes. Most exciting for HR pro purposes was the "What type of co-worker are you?" and "Find Company Fit" option. Once you've completed a handful of quizzes, you can search for companies and see if you're a cultural fit based on the insights from your quiz responses.

goodco

Normally, I'm skeptical of any purported "personality type" quiz (you all know Meiers-Briggs is a scam, right?) but here's where Good.co gets interesting. In the "Find Company Fit" page, users search for companies they want to learn more about. As far as I can tell, the culture of each company is assessed by the compiling the results of employees from that company who have filled out these questionnaires. From there, candidates are matched with companies based on how similar their responses were to the answers of that company's employees. In terms of aligning values and building a jigsaw-like workforce of employees who don't merely co-exist, but fit well and inspire one another, Good.co could prove an exciting way to assess culture fit. 

Fast Company spoke with co-founder Samar Birwadker for more details, and confirned some finer aspects of the app's framework. For example:

The quizzes--and there are many--have become more nuanced. The platform used to measure 15 personality traits, now it measures 45. Since so many people at different companies have played with the platform, Good.Co now has over 2 million data points for its company culture database.

In addition to checking culture fit, Good.co indexes job postings to allow candidates to search for open roles and apply. Good.co is by no means a job board, but this added functionality may emerge as a viable channel for inbound candidate interest, as they've already learned in a gamified, exciting fashion that your company is right for them. Your recruiting process isn't mobile-optimized? Good.co has you covered.

Birwadker claims they aren't pivoting towards emerging as a full-on HR tool just yet, but Good.co appears to be another instance of the realization of the immense potential of leveraging social data for the slippery career hunt. As the HR world has seen over the past few years, this is a popular notion. For example, have you heard of this awesome tool called Entelo?

What do you make of Good.co's tool? Can you see it being useful in your own recruitment practices? Leave a comment or tweet @EnteloRob!

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