To succeed on a job you aspire to win, it won’t suffice to have great credentials alone; you also need to have what it takes to fit into the mainstream of that workplace community. What it takes is no more than the core values inherent in that workplace. These core values are rarely mentioned in job ads unlike job descriptions. You’ve got to research them, and then ask yourself if in all frankness, you believe in them. Do they, for instance, accord to your sense of fairness? How does the core value of collective responsibility at the success or failure to attain a team’s goal come down to you? Do the core values align with what fuels you to attain stupendous goals for your employer? Is your personality such that only personal recognition and reward of your effort energize you to give your best to them? How does the core value of compensating and promoting staff on seniority instead of performance basis, go down well with you? And how, the practice of an immediate report by-passing you with an information or idea, and directly disclosing it to your boss? Would you be at home with a core value that discourages bold risking-taking to break new grounds?

If you are honestly okay with the values of the organisation you have researched, it means you’re culture-fit. When you get on board the organisation on the basis of your culture fitness, you’ll hit the ground running, swiftly acclimatise, and thus easily add value to it through your job performance. If however you aren’t culture-fit, your inclusion into the organisation either through an error of judgement on the part of the hiring manager, or by some deliberate false pretences that beat the culture-fit requirement, will be a disturbance to yourself, your colleagues, boss and reports, and in fact, the established order prevalent in the community.

Check out this scenario. Suppose a candidate has a First Class degree in Accounting, with an MBA degree and ACCA certification. He should naturally be a great candidate for finance, accounting or finance-related vacant position in an organisation. If however, the hiring manager or any other member of the interview team gets salient evidence-based clues during the interview session that the candidate has an attitude problem, is egoistic, takes official disagreement personal, carries grudge against a past colleague, subordinate or boss, is individualistic, and has many other such tendencies that are evidently against the culture in-house, the candidate will be rejected. If he is hired, situations will arise in the course of his job where he will exhibit those tendencies with the net results that the job will suffer. And no Chief Executive Officer wants the job-any aspect of it-to suffer.