{"id":4615,"date":"2025-05-08T19:44:31","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T19:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aomtodayprod.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=4615"},"modified":"2025-07-09T15:42:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T15:42:14","slug":"for-candidates-and-new-hires-fitting-in-is-as-crucial-as-skills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/for-candidates-and-new-hires-fitting-in-is-as-crucial-as-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"For Candidates and New Hires, Fitting in Is as Crucial as Skills"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Butcher <\/a><\/p>\r\n

It\u2019s a best practice for organizations to identify both formal and informal employee networks, establish how networks could change, and identify the specific human-resources (HR) practices that could affect those different networks. All of that will affect employees\u2019 collaboration, efficiency, and productivity.<\/p>\r\n

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot<\/a> of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter\u2014who cowrote an Academy of Management Review <\/a><\/em>article on this topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College and David Allen of Texas Christian University and University of Warwick<\/a>\u2014said it\u2019s important to analyze how different HR practices, including recruitment priorities and tactics, may affect employee relationships.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cWe know that organizations focus on different types of recruitment strategies; if we home in on this one type of recruitment strategy, what does that mean for the composition of employees\u2019 networks?\u201d Methot said. \u201cIf we select candidates based on certain competencies, what does that mean for people\u2019s network size or who\u2019s in that network?<\/p>\r\n

\u201cA lot of this was grounded in the idea that human-resource management traditionally has been really deeply rooted in the idea of human capital\u2014individuals\u2019 knowledge, skills, abilities, expertise, functional areas, training, etc.\u2014and trying to hire the best people based on their human capital, trying to train our employees so they have the knowledge and skills that they need to do that job well, and managing performance based on that human capital,\u201d she said. \u201cHow are they demonstrating those competencies and using those skills?<\/p>\r\n

\u201cIf we adopt this particular HR practice, what does that mean for the types of people and how they’re interacting in the organization?\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Methot and research colleagues identified three different dimensions to describe the composition of a network.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cThis is who is in your personal network\u2014as an employee, how many people are in my personal network, and who are those people?\u201d Methot said. \u201cThe configuration of the network is the pattern of relationships and the structure of the network connecting them.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cIs everyone in my community connected? Do they all know each other? Do they all share information? Or are we siloed or disconnected? Are there bottlenecks?\u201d she said.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cThe content of those relationships refers to the properties or the definition of those relationships, from workplace collaborator to friend, how strong those relationships are, the degree of trust between employees in a given network, and what they\u2019re communicating about, ranging from small talk and work tasks to personal information and gossip.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n

A sample of Methot\u2019s AOM research findings:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n