It’s like marriage. College students are searching for a compatible “partner” to spend the next 40 years of their lives.
It’s called a job.
“Job seekers should be determining if that company is the right fit for them and of course vice versa,” Brian Newton, director of career and internship development in the Poole College of Management, said.
A company’s culture is those “character traits” that can vary drastically in the same industry. Faculty gave their advice on the importance of considering culture and shared their personal experiences.
“Culture is more of an over-riding personality of the company, what their values are, what they reward, how people are treated,” Deborah Brown, lecturer in the Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said.
Culture can drastically affect what plays out for an employee when it comes to integrity, performance measurement and employee treatment, Brown said. A two-week stint at Westvaco, a paper company, for Brown was cut short as a formaldehyde spill highlighted a lack of respect for employees.
”Formaldehyde is very toxic and it was making our eyes water and our throats burn. They locked the gate and wouldn’t let us leave and said, ‘You need to work. We’ll clean it up,'” she said. “I never went back.”
Culture plays out in a different way for companies like SAS and Cisco, according to Brown, highlighting the balance between work and personal life.
“There’s kids everywhere [at SAS], you can go get your kids from daycare and take them to lunch, there are people talking, walking, the dress is very casual, those kinds of things,” she said. “Cisco…is known in the industry as great pay, good benefits, but they expect you to work for every hour and they push you to work more and more hours.”
Cultures can vary even within organizations. N.C. State and its dozen colleges is a prime example.
Susan Katz, associate professor of English and internship coordinator, said though the University as a whole has a culture ultimately based in the land-grant, state-focused front, individual departments can be drastically different from each other.
Brown said the faculty in the College of Management act with the formality of the corporations it is preparing its students for. Katz noted the broad, theoretical English department contrasts with the numbers and evidence of a social science.
And in the Department Chemical Engineering, Lisa Bullard, director of undergraduate studies, said the low turnover helps people develop relationships because they grow up together.
“You tend to connect with people who are at your same place in life,” she said.
Finding out major cultural detailsbefore the first day of work can start long before the first interview.
A network is essential and talking with graduated friends, asking them how they like their job and why, Roger Mayer, a professor who specializes in organizational behavior, said.
“You find that company culture is often a major driver of whether they like where they are or whether they’d like to move,” he said.
According to Mayer, using online resources is key for cultural research. He used the example of Burt’s Bees, a company committed to sustainability that looks closely at candidates for that same kind of passion, he said.
“You are going to figure out pretty quickly that sustainability and ecology is really important to them [on their website],” Mayer said.
According to Newton, personality assessments at the Career Development Center can help a student identify their strengths and values and places where they might fit. Students can also contact thousands of alumni through the Alumni Association database. Further exploration can occur through reading, job shadowing, internships and information interviews, he said.
Katz advocates the learning experience and resume-boosting power of internships.
“Doing internships exposes you to an organization’s culture. You can’t help but see it,” Katz, said.
In the interview process, according to Newton, interviewees have to match something in their values or strengths to the company’s through stories.
“In an interview today you have to be a good story teller,” Newton said. “You really do. You have to bring your resume to life.”
Interviews also provide deal-breaker cultural information the web can’t provide. Mayer warned against working at a company with drastically different values from your own.
“I have personally pulled out of interview processes just for that reason,” Mayer said.
But culture is not necessarily unchangeable.
“One problem in the current economy is you might not have the luxury of picking one that better suits you,” Brown said.
In the Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Mayer said the mutually supportive, unified culture developed there was not by accident, but deliberate.
“If you think about the culture you want to have, there are things you can do to develop it,” he said.
