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Across the GCC, organisations are investing heavily in growth, transformation and ambitious workforce plans, but high employee turnover can quickly undermine that investment. Hiring someone who can do the job is only part of the equation. A strong CV may demonstrate technical capability, but it can’t show if someone will thrive in the organisation, connect with its culture and social values or remain engaged over the long term.
That was the central theme of Aventus and FitMe’s recent webinar, The Cost of Misfit. Aventus’ Global Head of Search, George Berry and Arend Van Itterbeek, CEO of FitMe explored why organisations need to look beyond capability alone and assess the relationship between an individual and the environment they are joining.
The Hidden Cost of a Poor Fit
Your hiring decision may look successful on day one. Especially if the successful candidate has all the required experience and performed well at interview. But the real test begins post hire.
Poor organisational fit can lead to lower productivity, disengagement, absence and eventually employee turnover. It also creates costs that go well beyond replacing the individual. Recruitment and executive search fees, visa and relocation costs, onboarding, lost productivity, interim cover and client disruption as potential consequences of a mis-hire. Van Itterbeek: “You can quickly end up with a cost for the company between 100,000 and 200,000 dollars.”
For senior leadership appointments, the exposure can be significantly greater. In one recent C-suite appointment, misalignment between leadership styles only became apparent several months after the hire. Salary, recruitment costs and replacement fees are only the measurable elements. Lost momentum, delayed decisions, team disruption and unrealised commercial opportunities can make employee turnover at leadership level particularly damaging.
Why Capability Doesn’t Guarantee Retention
Traditional recruitment rightly considers skills, competence, experience and cognitive ability. A robust psychometric assessment can add further insight into personality and behavioural tendencies.
However, employers need to consider what happens when two candidates are equally capable but respond very differently to the same organisation?
Van Itterbeek: “Candidate A is staying for six months and then just leaving through the back door, and candidate B is staying for six years.”
FitMe’s approach assesses both the values of the candidate and the values that genuinely exist within the team or organisation. Rather than building a picture of someone’s capabilities in isolation, employers gain insight into how that individual is likely to operate within their future environment.
For employer’s trying to reduce employee turnover that is extremely valuable. Hiring for capability answers whether somebody can perform the role. Assessing fit provides greater insight into whether they are likely to remain motivated and committed while doing it.
Values Alignment and Employee Engagement
Your organisational culture is probably described in corporate statements, behaviours and leadership principles. Yet your employees experience that culture through the people around them every day. That day-to-day experience directly influences how connected they feel to the organisation they have joined. PwC found that 74% of Middle East employees believe their day-to-day work aligns with their organisation’s long-term goals, down from 88% in 2024.
Van Itterbeek: “Then we have what we call the underlying values. That’s basically the aggregate of the individual values that make up the organisation. The more aligned team leaders are, value per value, the stronger the corporate culture already is.”
This has implications for both employee retention and employee engagement. Someone can be highly competent and personable yet still find themselves working in an environment that consistently conflicts with what motivates them.
There are also limitations to relying on personality. Skills can be developed, behaviours can be coached, but a person’s values sit at a deeper level.
Berry: “A particular personality doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually going to be aligned.”
Aventus’ value-based recruitment approach, delivered through its exclusive GCC partnership with FitMe, is designed to assess this alignment earlier. FitMe measures candidates against an organisation’s cultural blueprint, providing data that can support decisions around retention, engagement and long-term fit.
Moving Beyond Instinct in Recruitment
Experienced hiring managers and recruiters often develop a strong instinct for whether somebody will fit a team. The challenge is turning that instinct into consistent, objective evidence.
A structured psychometric assessment can strengthen recruitment decisions, but it is important to understand exactly what is being measured. Personality, competence and cognitive ability can help predict performance. Values alignment provides a different perspective by examining the relationship between the individual and the organisation. Berry: “If you do have the values alignment, there’s a really good potential for it to still work out and be additive.”
That’s because values-based assessment is focused on understanding where differences will be constructive and where fundamental misalignment could contribute to employee turnover. For GCC employers hiring at scale, or making high-value leadership appointments, this additional evidence can help identify potential friction before it becomes an expensive retention problem.
Why Culture Starts at the Point Of Hire
Organisations invest considerable time in culture initiatives after employees join. Those programmes have value, but they cannot completely compensate for fundamental differences in what people care about. And, that’s important, because every new person changes the collective environment.
Van Itterbeek: “If you want to control that as management, and you want to steer that to the left or to the right, the only way to do this, because values are not trainable, is doing this during the talent acquisition phase. Talent acquisition, so to say, is the doorkeeper of your corporate culture.” Rather than treating employee fit and employee turnover primarily as post-hire HR issues, organisations can address part of the risk during recruitment itself.
Building Stronger Teams Through Values-Based Recruitment
Reducing employee turnover does not mean removing every difference from a team. Diverse experiences, personalities and perspectives remain valuable. Instead, employers should understand whether candidates share enough alignment with the organisation’s fundamental ways of working to succeed within it.
FitMe’s methodology creates a cultural profile using employees or leaders within the organisation, then compares candidate values against that profile. Aventus combines these insights with its GCC market knowledge, sector expertise and recruitment process to support more informed hiring decisions.
This enables organisations to easily identify potential misalignment before it contributes to disengagement, reduced productivity or another cycle of employee turnover. Aventus also uses FitMe internally, giving its team first-hand experience of the process.
Berry: “We have obviously practised what we preached and used FitMe assessments in our own hiring, as part of Aventus Academy, as well.”
How Aventus And FitMe Can Support Your Hiring Strategy
Aventus is the exclusive FitMe provider in the GCC, combining specialist regional recruitment expertise with FitMe’s scientifically validated values-assessment technology. Together, we enable employers to look beyond experience and technical capability and assess how candidates align with the culture they are joining.
If your organisation wants to strengthen employee retention, improve employee engagement and reduce the cost and disruption associated with employee turnover, Aventus can integrate values-based assessment into your recruitment process.