24 they found, you can be sure that potential candidates for your company won’t even apply if they’re not satisfied with their discoveries. In cases when sellers did not do research, it was almost always because they already knew (and usually, had already worked with) someone in the company. "For me, the one reason I took the job was because of the person that hired me and is my manager. I worked with him previously, when he took his first job in radio and at one point, I was his boss until he was promoted. I respected him and his integrity and that was the first and only reason I applied for the position I have." What’s the Impact of Company Culture? People want to work in a place where they’re comfortable yet feel challenged to grow. They want to work for a company whose investment in them is on par with the time and effort they’ll invest in working for that company. No one wants to dread coming into work every day. Candidates are going to be looking for signs that your company is going to meet those expectations. So the question becomes this: What are you doing to share your company culture with potential candidates to attract them? "You need to spend time looking into the company as a whole just not just the specific market in which you want to be hired. The company culture is just as important as the market culture." This is especially important in terms of diversity. According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report, 78% of businesses have made diversity a priority in order to improve their company culture, and another 62% do so to improve performance, citing growing evidence that teams are more innovative, engaged, and productive when they’re diverse. It’s the first of three key ideas – diversity, inclusion, belonging – that drives high productivity and retention. (We’ll get to the other two in our Selection and Retention pieces.) Unfortunately, they also found that 38% of businesses said that finding diverse candidates to interview was their greatest barrier to improving diversity. Pause and reconsider this a moment – are there really no diverse candidates to hire? Look at the way your company represents itself, especially in job postings, and take a look at your company culture with fresh eyes. Potential recruits are doing their homework on your company. Is the reason you can’t find diverse recruits that they don’t feel like they’d be accepted there?