Philosophy-Driven Recruitment: Initiatives to Minimize Mismatches

For Lionheart, recruitment means

Welcoming even one person to our company is a special occasion for us. Our purpose in hiring is not simply to increase our workforce. We hire people because they are valuable colleagues who will help us embody our brand promise, "To strongly support our clients in achieving their vision through branding and marketing," by utilizing a part of their important life and their individual strengths, based on our shared values and management philosophy of "creating smiles."

Recruitment failures cannot be rectified through education.

This is something we, too, have keenly felt through our repeated experiences of meeting and parting with candidates during the hiring process. We want to believe that with proper training, anything is possible, and even if there are some issues, we want to do everything we can to improve their abilities and develop them into competent professionals. I think many business owners and managers feel this way. I'm sure many have had the experience of discovering a mismatch after hiring someone, resulting in an extraordinary amount of time, effort, burden, and stress.
However, no matter how much you invest in training someone whose fundamentals don't align with your company's culture, it's all for naught. It won't lead to results. There's surely another environment that's a better fit for that person, and the same goes for the company. Both employees and the company are using each other's valuable time (i.e., their lives) to carry out their activities. That's why,Recruitment is more important than education.I believe that.

—That's why persona development needs to be done meticulously.

Even if you're enthusiastic about hiring someone for a specific position, if you can't concretely picture the kind of new colleague you want to welcome, whether they'll be a good fit for your company will be a gamble. In other words, it's highly likely to be a major mistake that can't be fixed with training. At Lionheart, we make it a point to clearly define the purpose of the hiring, and to achieve that purpose, we prioritize clearly defining the character of the person we're looking for: what qualities they should possess, what kind of personality they should have, what kind of career they should have built over how many years, what they should be good at, and around what age they should be.To put it extremely, it could even be something like, "Who is the kind of person we want to hire from within the company?"Therefore, defining such specific personas is important in website creation and branding, and we call this "persona setting."

—That's why designing and explaining the selection process is important.

Even if we have a clear idea of the kind of person we want to hire, we can't be sure that the job seekers who have made it through the document screening process to the interview stage are a good fit for us. That's why we have an extensive selection process. There are at least six steps. All three executives conduct interviews, so there are at least three rounds of interviews. In the interviews, each person checks and compares the person's character from their own perspective and position. In addition, we also conduct practical skills tests and aptitude tests. The purpose of these is to objectively verify the qualities and characteristics of the person that we have grasped through their documents and interviews.

Hiring failures truly cannot be rectified through training alone.This may seem like a situation solely for the company's convenience, but it's also a tragedy for the person who is mistakenly hired. During the selection process, job seekers are often driven solely by the desire to join the company. Job hunting requires a lot of energy, so it's understandable that they want to settle down somewhere. The same is true for the hiring side. They are desperate to meet their hiring targets for the current term. If someone they interact with is polite, well-dressed, and makes a good impression, that person can seem incredibly nice. This is especially true for hiring managers. In other words, both sides are under a strange kind of bias from the very beginning. It's as if they're under a spell, like two people wanting to become a couple.

To eliminate such biases and recruit people who closely match our ideal profile, we do everything we can during the recruitment process. We also make sure to explain these circumstances during the first interview. Our management philosophy is "Creating Smiles." It's about imagining and actually creating smiles for our customers, partners, and colleagues. In the context of recruitment, job seekers are our customers. To ensure that their experience with us doesn't end tragically, we require them to go through a much more extensive selection process than other companies, without exception.

—That's why we're making every effort to disclose our own information.

In this way, we strive to eliminate any bias on the hiring side, but we also help reduce the mental biases of job seekers. Job seekers who are interested in our company are full of expectations, so if they come in without any preparation, there is a chance they will be disappointed. For example, when our company was aging, we made it a point to tell them that all our employees were in their late 30s or early 40s. Also, because we are a values-based management company, we do things that are not done in typical production companies, such as having employees write daily reports and commenting on each other's reports every day in order to make our management philosophy ingrained in their daily lives. Some people dislike these kinds of initiatives, so we make sure to explain them clearly. In other words, for someone who doesn't know much about our company and whose expectations are only high,I've told them everything that could potentially be a negative point.That's the point.

These kinds of misunderstandings can be irreparable once you've joined the company, so we encourage you to see things as they are. Also, there's absolutely nothing you can't ask during the selection process, so please feel free to ask about anything that concerns you, no matter how small.

# Recruitment # Human Resources # Philosophy-Based Management