Hiring for "Culture Fit" is Backwards
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A complete reframe of the topic of companies hiring for culture fit.
Hiring for “culture fit” is a backwards way of looking at it. Here’s two different reasons why — the second one is the crux of this entire conversation.
First of all, how do you know?
Hiring to find someone who aligns with your values is pretty hard to do. The reality is that people are going to say in the interview process that their values align with yours, so how can you tell who is genuine? Spoiler alert: there’s no way to know.
And if that approach is what you have in place to ideally hire and have intentional, exceptional employees inside your organization, that’s a lot of hoping and relying on something that’s pretty far from an exact science.
Secondly, and more importantly, hiring this way just doesn’t make sense.
Rather than the idea of hiring someone that already fits perfectly into your culture, it makes more sense that as an organization you have a clearly defined, established culture in place that you can articulate to people in the hiring and onboarding process. Then, at any point when you bring someone into the organization, you can express to them how they need to show up in order to be successful on your team.
When you are hiring someone, as an organization you should be clear about what the expectations are for every member of your team in terms of how they show up, treat other people, and approach their work.
Be clear from the start.
For an exact, concrete example of what I mean, when I am in the process of hiring anyone onto my team I share our company’s Cultural DNA Code with them. This document allows me to be clear from the get go about the behaviors and mindsets that define what it means to be part of my team and what every person is held accountable to.
It allows me to say: “This is what it takes to be successful here. This is how we deal with conflict. This is our relationship with feedback. This is what accountability means for us.”
At the end of this article, there’s a link to download my team’s Cultural DNA Code so you can check it out and see exactly what I mean.
Candidates shouldn’t be chosen because they’re already a perfect fit in terms of culture — it ultimately doesn’t matter what other cultures they’ve experienced, or what behaviors were allowed at other companies. The truth is that the same employee will show up in very different ways in two very different cultures.
Rather, they should be chosen on emotional intelligence and the traits and interpersonal skills that best suit the role that you’re hiring for. Don’t hire for “culture fit,” hire someone and coach them on how to be successful in your team & accountable to your organization’s culture.
Additional thoughts on hiring for culture fit.
The topic of hiring for culture fit is also extremely challenging from my standpoint as someone who does culture work with leaders and organizations because the reality is that most companies do not have a clearly defined culture in place.
Many companies have a list of corporate values like Trust, Integrity, Excellence, Teamwork, etc. but that is not culture, and it doesn’t impact people’s behavior.
In most companies if you were to take 5, or 10, or 20 different people at random, including leaders and executives, and ask them to describe the company’s culture they would all say wildly different things. Every company has a culture, but for most companies is it not something that is clear, or understood, and often it is extremely inconsistent in terms of how people experience it or what anyone is held accountable to.
So if a company doesn’t have a clearly articulated culture that is universally understood and consistent, that they are committed to and take ownership of, then how can they hire for candidates who fit their culture? Very simply — they can’t.
Usually companies “hiring for culture fit” just means hiring based on unconscious bias and other problematic judgements. This approach can greatly hurt culture, diversity, and the company as a whole because it often will weed out exceptional candidates based on criteria that is problematic, like the hiring manager having a lot in common with them personally, etc.
The approach of bringing folks into a well defined culture and coaching them up to be accountable to that culture versus hiring for an already perfect fit allows for more diversity, acquiring better talent, and a stronger, healthier organization overall.
My team’s Cultural DNA Code free download:
Here is our team’s DNA Code to see an example of a clearly defined culture, download it here.
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