When you’re looking for a new role, company culture is tremendously important. For some candidates, it’s even more important than salary. After all, who cares what you’re making if your working life is miserable? On today’s Argentus blog, we’re exploring strategies for how you can go beyond the buzzwords to evaluate a company’s culture before you start a new role.

We live in a complex time for company cultures. As we all know, the pandemic threw things up in the air. In 2025, many companies still have a mix of hybrid, in-office and remote work, which makes it harder to establish a shared culture than when all stakeholders are present in the same place. But within this complex landscape, a strong company culture still shines through. When you start a role, it quickly becomes clear whether a company has the kind of culture that suits your working style. 

But if you’re assessing a new opportunity, say in a job interview, how do you assess whether a company culture is strong or not? 

It’s natural, even necessary, to assess a company’s culture before you start a job. Do they foster an open communication style? Do they value collaboration, or internal competition? Are they a rigid, hierarchical organization, or are they more of a flat or matrixed environment? Companies spend a lot of resources trying to communicate these factors to prospective applicants. But the copy on a Careers section of a website, or how a company writes their job descriptions, can only tell you so much. 

As a specialized recruitment firm in supply chain management and procurement, Argentus sits at the fulcrum of companies looking to hire and candidates looking for jobs. When securing talent for our clients, part of our role is to assess the strengths of a company’s culture and communicate that to candidates. It helps to get them excited about opportunities, but also to help them form an honest assessment of whether a workplace is right for them.

So for today’s Argentus blog, we want to offer some of our advice about how to assess a company’s culture prior to starting a role. 

Here are our biggest tips! 

Ask the right questions

When seeking a role, it’s important to identify what kind of company culture suits you best. It’s not just a binary matter of “good” or “bad.” Most often, the differences in cultures are more subtle, and it’s more a matter of fit.

Once you identify the kind of organization you’d like to work for, it’s important to remember that as much as a company is interviewing you for a role, you’re also interviewing them. Whether an interview is remote or in-person, companies are expecting candidates to have questions about the role during an interview, and also about the company’s culture. But it’s important to ask the right questions. 

Simply asking, “what is the company culture like?” may not get you the answers you’re looking for. In general, if you ask a generic question, you’ll get a generic response. Alternative questions might include things like:

“What are the biggest surprises that candidates tend to experience when they start?”

“What would you describe as the company’s biggest values, and would you have any examples of how that impacted a business decision?”

“What sort of programs do you have in place for learning or continuous development?”

These are just examples, but should help give you a sense of how specificity is more helpful than generalities. 

2. Pay attention to how they manage the recruitment process

As the old adage goes, actions speak louder than words. It’s easy enough for a company to put buzzwords about their culture on a careers page or job posting. What’s harder is to put those values into action. Companies spend lots of resources trying to build strong company cultures, and to make sure that their processes reflect their values. And hiring is one of the most crucial processes that a company has. 

For that reason, you can learn a lot about a company’s culture by how they manage their hiring process. Do they answer questions forthrightly? If not, it could be a sign that the company doesn’t foster transparency in their organization. Do they engage in endless delays with little explanation? This could be a sign that a company is disorganized. If you’re interviewed by multiple stakeholders from different departments, how do they interact with each-other? If they’re closed off, it could be a sign that the company is highly siloed, with less collaboration than you’d like. 

The way a company does its hiring doesn’t say everything about their culture. For example, it’s certainly possible that a highly organized company has a hiring process that gets bogged down in delays because of scheduling or other factors outside their control. But a company’s approach during the hiring process can tell you a lot about their culture. 

3. See what other people have to say, but keep an open mind

If you’re moving forward in the hiring process, it’s natural to want to look at reviews of companies on sites like Glassdoor or Google Reviews. These reviews might give you some insight into a company’s culture, but it’s important to take them with a grain of salt. First of all, it’s impossible to know the veracity of the reviews. You may also be reading feedback from disgruntled employees who underperformed. These reviews might also not necessarily be relevant to your position: for example, a review complaining of workplace culture in the U.S. may not be relevant to a position in Canada. 

What’s more valuable than online reviews is to speak with current company employees. If you’re contemplating a job offer, it doesn’t hurt to reach out on LinkedIn and ask for a brief chat to discuss the company. Most people won’t say negative things about their current employer, but they can give you some high-level descriptions of the company culture that you won’t necessarily get from online reviews. 

4. Trust your gut

This may be our most important piece of advice. Prior to accepting a job, there are questions you can ask, red (and green) flags to pay attention to, and people you can speak with to make sure that you get the whole picture. 

By the time you make it through the interview process, you should have an overall impression about the company. It can be daunting, but ultimately you have to trust that overall gut feeling about the company’s culture. 

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Assessing a company’s culture has many different angles, and there’s only so much you can do before taking the plunge into a new role. But hopefully this post outlines some helpful tips about how to do your due diligence as you progress through an interview process. 

And as always, if you have any immediate or upcoming hiring needs in Supply Chain Management, Procurement, Logistics, Operations or Planning, reach out to Argentus today! Call 416 364 9919 or send an email to recruit@argentus.com outlining your requirements!