#14 Leverage Recruiting for Culture Change

Fish in the Boardroom

With Georg Lange

When recruiting for an open position finding suitable candidates can be challenging. At the same time, with every new hire, you have an opportunity to shape your company culture. So how can you go about this hiring process and ensure that you hire the best candidate? The person that has the expertise required, but also the cultural fit that will ensure the success of both, the candidate, and the company.

Now add the challenge to recruit women in those male-dominated positions. This is the challenge that Georg Lange set out for himself. He used the DIER Model for his hiring process and observed how he ended up hiring 70% women and increased the number of women in his leadership team to 40%. Which in turn lead to stunning financial results in 2020 despite a difficult economic environment.

In this episode, Georg talks about how he consciously used diversity hiring to shape the EFTEC AG company culture, why he did so and the results that came from this.

"If there is all of a sudden, a woman in the meetings and [men] have to deal with women on a day-to-day basis. This changes the behavior of men significantly and for the better. It becomes much more precise and much clearer."

What you will learn

· How to use the DIER Model in your hiring process to identify the right candidate for your company based on skills but also on cultural fit

· Hiring women in critical positions might still require convincing of established leadership

· How women influence a company culture to become more precise and effective

Tips

· Focus on the results you want to achieve not on the profile of your ideal candidate

· Consider the extra time investment in finding female candidates as an investment in the quality of your candidates

· Be open, question the value system you are working and searching against

Resources

Article explaining the DIER Modell: DIER Modell: Perfect Match (German)

Detailed presentation of the DIER Modell: cmm360 im Gespräch: Das DIER Modell

Video Interview with Chris Holzach on the Health aspect of the DIER Modell: Das DIER Modell – Teil 2

Find Georg online

LinkedIn

Biography

Georg Lange is focused on one of the most important areas in a company: its people, their leaders, and the results achieved. He has a total of 25 plus years of experience in driving strategic initiatives as well as daily operations in Human Resources. His tenures have covered all phases from Assessment, Strategy, Concept, Implementation, Operation, and Improvement.

Georg Lange has started his career in a Big 4 consulting firm, moving into global responsibility in HR functions in large international groups, as well as accompanying promising start-ups. For more than 10 years now his passion and in the meantime huge expertise is on digitalization and 4i amendments in the automotive, chemical, and financial industries. For virtually 3 years he led a scientifically based research project on how a company’s culture influences the overall success of a company. The findings formed the basis for the so-called DIER Modell, which supports finding the perfect match for an open position. In his current role as Global Head HR at EFTEC AG, he has implemented the model and uses it to find leaders and employees who not onlyensure the success of the company but also feel extremely well in their new position. In this case, 70% of all newly hired leaders are females.

Georg Lange holds an MBA and a MAS of HWZ. He has co-published two books about digitalization and 4i and written numerous articles.