At Boston Search Group, we're proud to have hosted over a decade of Private Equity CEO Exit Panels, bringing together accomplished CEOs who have...
A research-accepted best proxy for company culture assessment.
The Problem BSG Discovered: Companies & clients continue to hire great resumes, but not great fits.
The Answer BSG Developed: The Culture Fit Survey
A culture assessment tool to measure culture/climate for both a company as well as a candidate being considered for hire. The research-accepted best proxy for culture definition—what behaviors does a company reward, punish, and tolerate.
April 2019, Capital RoundTable "Best Practices for Creating Value in PE Portfolio Companies: "For ADD-ON acquisitions, it’s really important to assess the culture of platform company, and add-on acquisition to ensure compatibility. Without this pre-assessment, synergies expected often fail to materialize or worse, the add-on completely fails to be accretive."
In our case, the purpose of defining a company culture is all about fit. The word “fit” is such a simple-looking and sounding word—3 letters, one syllable—how hard could it be? Well, it turns out that determining a potential employee’s “fit” with an existing organization is devilishly difficult. Why? Because it’s multifactorial. And because of this, at BSG we like to try to shift our specific intent away from the world “culture” because of the noise and pollution around it that makes it very difficult for all to share a unified definition. So we’ve moved our working word to “climate” instead of culture. So—now armed with a clean word to define our aim, we can move forward with the “why & how” we approach the company-candidate climate fit.
Our Definition of Climate? The proven, research-accepted best proxy for this task is to ask the question, “What behaviors do we in our company reward, punish, and tolerate?”
The How: Here at BSG, we’ve built a tool that does just that, and we’ve named the Culture Fit Survey—it asks each participant which behaviors are lauded, penalized, and ignored. There are several pieces to this climate survey*:
Minimum Number of Participants
A minimum of 5 internal company stakeholders need to participate to make the results representative, with a preference for up to 10, across the functional and leadership spectrum.
How long does it take each stakeholder to complete?
Less than 10 minutes (48 multiple choice questions)
Can you participate via computer OR mobile device?
Yes, the tool is optimized for both.
What is this cultural assessment tool based on in terms of peer reviewed research?
For the most part, London Business School Professor Charles Handy’s work (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Handy)
How much does it cost?
For more information and a scoping estimate, please reach out so we can customize a CFS tailored to your needs.
At Boston Search Group, we're proud to have hosted over a decade of Private Equity CEO Exit Panels, bringing together accomplished CEOs who have...
We get asked a lot of questions. That is natural—after all, when you're considering who to place your trust in for a high-level upcoming executive search you're going to need to cover all the details up front. But in our 20-year experience we have detected a clear pattern of the most frequently asked questions and concerns from prospective clients.
We've gone ahead and compiled them here, as answered by Managing Director Clark Waterfall. He's (quite literally) heard it all and answered it all before. We invite you to join him and get to know BSG.
We believe that the globe of talent is comprised of two hemispheres – optimizers and builders. Each is critical for different stages of company growth and development.
BSG's focus is on the builders.