If you’re spending your days staring out the window and longing for the weekend, you might be surprised to learn you’re not alone. According to a recent study by specialist recruitment firm Hays Canada, roughly half of Canadians are unhappy at work. What’s more, “workplace fit” was identified as the number one reason employees left a job (voluntarily or not.)
While 86% of respondents believed workplace fit was essential to contentment and success at work, only a third felt confident with their own fit at work, while another third said they had no idea whether they were a good match for their job at all.
Rowan O’Grady, President of Hays Canada, attributes these findings to a fundamentally flawed hiring process. “The recruitment process is set up to fail when it comes to fit,” he explains. “From a candidate’s point of view, it’s set up as a competition. If you get offered the job, you’ve won the competition. It’s extremely difficult to turn down a job offer, especially if it’s a job with significantly more money. And in situations where the candidate takes the job only for the money, the majority of the time it does not work out well.”
When it comes to employers, 49% admitted to hiring someone they felt was ill-suited for the position, a decision that they reported costing them anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000 in the long run.
At the time of hiring, both employers and employees ranked work ethic as the most important qualification for any position. Yet, both also rated social incompatibility as the main cause of termination. O’Grady sees this as a lack of proper prioritization when it comes to selecting the right candidate for the job. “People tend to prioritize tangible things—skills, experience, references—over fit. The problem is, these things don’t always signal whether an employee is right for a job.”
He believes that employers and potential employees need to get to know one another in a non-interview context, in order to determine whether they would integrate well into the workplace. “If an offer could be coming, I encourage candidates to ask ‘could I come into the office and meet the team’ or ‘would I be able to spend an hour and see how things work’? Once you’re in the office you can get feel for ‘if I was actually working here would it feel right?’”
So if you do, in fact, like your job? “If you like where you work, and you like the people you work with, I’d advise you to stay where you are,” says O’Grady. “Regardless of money, who you spend your days with is going to determine how happy you are in your work.”
This article originally appeared on CanadianBusiness.com.
