If You Can't Hire By Your Core Values, They're Not Clear Enough

Most firms have core values. They're on the website, painted in huge letters on the conference room wall, or tucked into the onboarding deck.

And almost no one thinks about them again.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: if your core values are aspirational—things you want to be, not things you already are—they're not values. They're goals. And the difference matters more than most leaders realize.

Values Aren't Invented, They're Uncovered

Real core values aren't something you decide in a leadership retreat and design into a nice graphic. They already exist in how your team makes decisions under pressure, how you handle a difficult client, and what you refuse to compromise on even when it costs you.

Your job isn't to create them from scratch—it's to name what's already true in practice.

We're living this process right now at Correnti. As a team, we asked ourselves: what do we admire most in each other? What makes us different? When have we felt most proud?

The answers weren't aspirational. They were what was already true. We uncovered values like "Put People First" and "Return the Cart" not because they sounded good, but because we could point to specific moments where these showed up in how we work.

Pressure-Test Your Values

Here's how to pressure-test your values: for each one, ask your team to name a real example of it in action. Not a hypothetical, but a specific moment: a client situation, a hiring decision, a time someone did the hard thing because it was the right thing.

If you can find the story, the value is real.

If you can't, that's useful data too. It means the value lives in your aspirations, but isn’t a part of your culture yet. Aspirational values aren't inherently bad, although it’s helpful to label them honestly as goals for the future, rather than incorporating them into  your current identity. Otherwise, you're marketing a version of your firm that doesn't fully exist, and that disconnect shows up at exactly the wrong moments.

Values Should Guide Real Business Decisions

Good values function like a decision-making framework. When someone faces an ambiguous situation, they should be able to ask, "What do our values say to do here?" and get a clear, actionable answer. If the answer is always "It depends," or "Check with a manager,," your values aren't clear enough.

Once you've identified your real values, put them to work:

• Hiring: Does this candidate embody what you've named? Can they tell you about a time they lived one of your values without knowing what they are?

• Firing: When someone isn't working out, it's often due to misaligned values. Are they respectful? Accountable? If your values are clear, these conversations become clearer.

• Client onboarding: Not every client is the right fit. If a prospect doesn't respect your team or expects you to compromise on what matters most, your values should give you permission to walk away.

Build Practices That Keep Values Alive

Defining values is half the work. The other half is building practices that keep them alive.

At Correnti, we built regular rituals: weekly win check-ins to practice gratitude, monthly "wave reports," to share challenges we want to address as a team, and quarterly reflections on how we're living our values in real time.

Small rituals compound into culture.

The key is consistency. Values need reinforcement, not just articulation.

Review Regularly as a Team

Firms evolve. What was true three years ago might be outdated or in conflict with who you've become. A values review is one of the most valuable exercises a firm can do—not to reinvent yourself, but to get honest about who you actually are right now.

Questions worth asking:

• Can we tell a story for each value?

• Are there things we consistently do that aren't named anywhere?

• Are any values outdated or misaligned with who we've grown into?

• Do our values empower independent decisions, or do they require constant interpretation?

Start Here

Get your team together. Ask everyone to bring one story: a moment they were proud to be part of your firm, or when someone made a decision that felt distinctly like you.

Listen for the patterns. Those are your real values.

Then ask: do the values we have written down reflect what we just heard?

If so, name them, story-stack them, and start intentionally reinforcing them. Put them to work in hiring, firing, and client selection.

If not, you've got honest work to do.

Values aren't a branding exercise. They're a leadership strategy. Get them right, and they become one of your most powerful tools for building your team, attracting the right clients, and showing up with the consistency that turns good firms into trusted ones.

Want to see what this looks like in practice? Our team just went through this entire process ourselves. Explore our newly revised core values to see what we found to be true for our team and how we're bringing them to life through regular practices.

Correnti Marketing helps professional service firms build brands rooted in who they actually are—not who they think they should sound like. If you're ready to market from a place of real clarity, let's talk.