At Stories Inc, we talk about company values all the time. We link major company decisions to our values and use them to guide our actions. Everyone on the team is welcome (and in fact encouraged) to take our core values to heart, or to change them if we can’t come up with stories to reinforce them. Why? Our core values matter to us, and we want them to matter to new hires, too.

A valuable interview with Zappos

Rick Jordan, Zappos’ Head of Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience, told us in an interview for our podcast that core values matter. A lot.

“One of our core values is Deliver WOW Through Service. We’ll ask the candidates something like, ‘What is WOW customer service to you?’ or ‘When have you experienced really awesome customer services?’ Or on the flip side, ‘When have you experienced really terrible customer service?’

Another one of our core values is Do More With Less, so we’ll ask the candidate: ‘Tell us your best MacGyver moment.’ Another question we’ll ask is around team spirit. So we’ll say, ‘At Zappos we get a monthly team building budget. So if you were new to the team and you knew nothing about them, but you knew you had a little bit of money to work with, and the goal was to just go have fun, what would you plan for your team outing?'”

These questions are far more than riddles or “gotcha” questions. They reflect the spirit of what Zappos is all about, and they filter for candidates that share their values (or not).

We do the same thing at Stories Inc. It’s essential for our team members to be on board with our purpose and values. When I was interviewing to join the team, Scott and Lauryn asked me to choose one of Stories’ core values and explain how I align with it (I think I picked “Think Big But Sweat the Small Stuff” and told a story about building elaborate robots across a six-week period).

Right skills, wrong values

Sometimes a job requires certain abilities and no amount of positive cultural attributes will supersede a skill deficit. But it’s harder to imagine a smart person who doesn’t match the company values. Think about it: someone is super experienced and highly adept. But he/she doesn’t live what your company strives for. It’s difficult to reason they’d really make the right impact on the company.

So when it comes down to it and there’s a lot of smart candidates to choose from, it’s worth asking about candidate-value alignment. Ask for their MacGyver moment, their favorite fictional role model, and their favorite core values—what they tell you will make a world of difference for the team you hire.