Last updated: 10-1-2026
Clint Smith is the founder & president of CareerPlug. This month we’ve asked him to share his thoughts about one of our core values.
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Hiring for values and culture means choosing people who share the specific values your company actually lives by, not just candidates with the right skills on paper. Define what you actually value, then hire and interview for it on purpose.
In Short: Hiring for values and culture means defining the values your company actually lives by, then hiring and interviewing for them as deliberately as CareerPlug rebuilt its own core values around Make Hiring Easier.
OUR EXPERIENCE WITH HIRING FOR VALUES AND CULTURE
“Collaborative. Hard-working. Fast-paced. Nurturing. Innovative. A little nerdy. The CareerPlug culture is a collection of our individual diversities and passions — above all, we believe in doing good work alongside good people. We are a team that doesn’t exist within our culture, rather, we build our culture every day by honoring our core values.” That is still how CareerPlug describes its own culture today, more than a decade after this page first ran. The value survived because the team kept hiring and building around it, not because it stayed a line on a wall.
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SEE CAREERPLUG IN ACTIONWhy We Rewrote Our Core Values Around Culture
The CareerPlug team recently decided to make some important changes to our Core Values. While we were all pleased with the growth that CareerPlug has experienced as a company over the past few years, we also felt that we were not doing enough to incorporate these values into our everyday work. Many of our newer team members did not see our values as much more than a sign on the wall at our office. I wanted to change that.
One common theme among successful companies is that every team member has a clear sense of the organization’s goals and values – and they live and breathe them every day. I realized that we needed to update our values to more clearly define our mission and culture.
Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand will just happen naturally on its own.
– Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos.com
Choosing Make Hiring Easier as Our Culture-Defining Value
Through conversations with our clients and team members, we were reminded of something special – our hiring software is really easy to use. Our clients come to us looking for an easier way to hire high-quality team members. Some of them are still stuck using emails or spreadsheets to recruit, while others are looking for relief from another applicant tracking system (ATS) that is too difficult for their managers to use. These clients consistently tell us that our system is easy to use: a big compliment considering that some of these clients are, by their own admission, not exactly computer experts!
We decided that Make Hiring Easier should top our updated list of Core Values. This process has given us a clear understanding of who we are and, perhaps more importantly, who we are not. We make hiring software for non-software people. This means that it needs to be easy enough to use for any owner, manager or team member – not just HR professionals. It also means that we may need to pass on implementing features that will add complexity to our system. Now whenever we have an important decision to make, we are asking ourselves: Will this make hiring easier?
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”
– Roy E. Disney
How We Knew the Value Had Stuck
I knew that we got the Make Hiring Easier core value right within about 15 minutes of formally introducing it to the entire team. After the meeting, I heard the phrase “Make Hiring Easier” used multiple times by our Dedicated Account Managers during calls with their clients. When I thanked one of them for including it in a conversation, he said “It just came naturally – that’s who we are.”
Make Your Own Core Value More Than a Sign on the Wall
Our first hiring best practice is, “Know who you are.” Before you think about who you need to hire, you need to step back and think about who you are as a company.
Start with your company’s core values:
- Where do you see examples of your core values being lived out by your employees?
- Study your team’s behaviors and see what actual values they collectively hold. You can do this even if you don’t have core values yet!
- Ask some of your team members about how they would currently describe your company culture. Note any words that consistently show up.
Remember that great company culture isn’t something you can dictate and slap on a wall; it’s something that’s built by employees and leaders in their daily actions.
Frequently Asked Questions About Hiring for Values and Culture
What does it mean to hire for culture fit?
Company culture isn’t who you look like, your shared backgrounds, or even your shared interests. Culture is your shared values as a company. Culture fit means that someone is aligned with those values. That’s it.
Why does culture fit matter when you’re hiring?
Netflix has a saying embedded in their own culture: no brilliant jerks. This is culture fit in a nutshell — if someone can’t work with the team, they can’t work. Studies have shown that hires who are a good culture fit have better job satisfaction, higher job performance, and are more likely to stay.
Ready to Turn These Recommendations into a Repeatable Hiring Process?
CareerPlug gives your team the tools to put this hiring for values and culture guidance into action without adding more administrative work.
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