“Everyone says: Do [recruits] fit culturally?” said Szen Chew, director, global talent acquisition at Ciena. “What we’re trying to do is really reconsider, reinforce, and ensure that cultural fit doesn’t just mean, oh it’s another someone like us. Because that doesn’t create and push the diversity that we’re looking for. No, we need to be able to bring candidates that can bring something new to the business, help fill blind spots, push the boundaries, expand horizons, and really equip those teams and the wider organisation for future success. If you keep hiring just mirrors of yourself because it’s a good cultural fit, that doesn’t help you advance and push boundaries and think outside the box.”
Read more: IWD 2021: How to tackle the STEM gender gap
Reinforcing discrimination
What’s more, hiring for culture fit can further perpetuate existing bias in the company. Take for example when a female professional sets out to join a company in a male-dominated industry like STEM. See May Soo, senior system engineer at Ciena, is a veteran in the industry with more than 10 years of experience. Ciena has provided a conducive and diverse environment for her to grow and excel in, but she’s had her fair share of unfavourable experiences in the past. She cited many challenges in working in a male-dominated industry, such as societal expectations, stereotypes, or the lack of representation in a workplace.
“Personally, I will stand my ground and not give in to bias,” she said. “For example, I have once experienced gender bias in a company’s hiring process, where the interviewer had requested that I not get married or pregnant in the next 18 months. Ultimately, I rejected the offer as I felt that the criteria was unfair to women.” Such biased views may be reflective of that specific hiring manager, or it could imply a wider company culture or practice.
Then there was the time a company reinforced bias in their culture through policy. “The divide can manifest in often overlooked areas – as simple as workplace attire,” she said. “In some companies I have previously been with, there were rules that made it compulsory for female employees to change between lab attire such as long pants and polo tees to attire that is stereotypically appropriate for women to meet clients, like skirts and heels. This is challenging because there shouldn’t be different dress standards according to gender.”
I originally posted this article on Dice Insights
Culture fit: It’s a concept that has dominated conversations among recruiting and hiring teams. A seemingly harmless idea on the surface, recruiting for culture fit prioritizes candidates who reflect a company’s culture as it exists today. In theory, this sounds great: Hiring people who want to work for your organization and easily mesh with the culture. The challenge is, some leaders act on initiatives to boost company culture without clearly defining what that culture entails.
A study by Cubiks found that 82 percent believed measuring cultural fit was an important part of the recruitment process, but only 54 percent said their organizations had a clearly defined culture. So let’s unpack what went wrong with culture fit, and reframe that narrative for the modern talent acquisition process.
What is Culture Fit?
Although a significant number of respondents from the Cubiks study said that their organizations don’t have a clear definition of their culture or standard methods to measure how an individual fits within in, 59 percent reported that they’ve rejected a candidate because they lacked cultural fit.
By definition, culture fit is… well, in the hiring process, it’s usually whatever the interviewer or decision-maker wants it to be. In other words, there is no fixed definition, which is where hiring teams run into trouble. As Courtney Seiter, Director of People at Buffer explained: The phrase can either be a gauge for your company’s values, or something as simple as whether or not you would want to get a beer with the candidate after work. It’s not exactly a scientific measure of a candidate’s on-the-job potential.
Prioritizing culture fit without a clear, company-wide understanding of what that culture means can be harmful to tech companies for various reasons, such as introducing bias, uniformity, irrelevancy, a lack of innovation and creativity, stunted problem-solving ability, and a faulty feedback loop that fulfills existing prejudices.
What’s more, Wharton management professor Katherine Klein suggests: “The biggest problem is that while we invoke cultural fit as a reason to hire someone, it is far more common to use it to not hire someone. People can’t tell you what aspect of the culture they are worried about.”
Recruiting and hiring is not a popularity contest, and that mentality is at least one of the factors contributing to the so-called “tech bro” or “brogrammer” culture that is so frequently associated with Silicon Valley. If today’s HR professionals want to put a stop to this phenomenon, it’s time to move towards a more focused and intentional strategy.
Shifting Company Culture to Company Values
While some tech firms such as Facebook have already cut out the term “culture fit” from their interviewing and hiring process, others such as Pandora and Atlassian have opted to use terms like “cultural contribution,” “cultural add,” or “values fit.”
Professor Sigal Barsade of Wharton shares: “The only way that culture in the workplace is effective is if there are sets of values that help the company achieve its strategy.”
By taking a more values-centric approach, organizations can improve their hiring outcomes by helping align prospective candidates with the company in ways that go beyond just liking their coworkers. As a company’s culture inevitably grows and changes, its core values should remain the same and hold their place within the organization.
If a company wants to reshape the way it views culture, the most effective route would be to start from the ground up, by clearly defining three to five core values. Factor in the current employer brand, perceived culture and candidate expectations. Be sure to involve your key stakeholders in this process. Then, apply those core values to other steps in the hiring process—especially the interview, which is usually where most culture-fit conversations occur.
Mitigate the risk of unconscious bias by introducing a standard method of measuring potential newcomers, with a structured set of questions to ask every interviewee. The goal of these questions should be to gauge a prospective candidate’s alignment with your company values. Barsade’s examples include questions such as: “How much of a team player are you? How detail-oriented? What type of emotions do you tend to display or suppress?”
The key is to focus on hiring people with shared goals, not shared viewpoints and backgrounds. Support structured interviewing with programs to help uncover and overcome bias. You could even implement unconscious bias training to help hiring managers and other key stakeholders prepare to talk with prospective tech candidates.
Continuously Reflect, Discuss and Improve
After clearly defining the core values, tech companies can broaden their scope and promote place-making rather than simple inclusivity, by creating space for several types of candidates. This can aid in expanding the culture in a way that champions what individual employees add to the organization. One way to implement this is to have an ongoing dialogue about gaps in culture. Buffer, for example, asks their hiring team questions such as: “Does this person offer a dimension that our culture might be missing? In what ways might this person challenge our thinking and processes? Will this person bring a viewpoint or context we may be missing?”
On the recruiter side, it’s pretty well-known that tech recruiting cannot (and should not) be based on the likelihood of hanging out with the candidate post-hire. Emphasize a conversation around core values, interview questions and company culture with your hiring managers. Establishing a shared understanding early on can help you cover the funnel from top to bottom and ensure that you’re sending the right messages to your tech candidates. Rather than subtracting, focus on combining values and culture in a meaningful way. Develop a recruiting strategy that fosters a shared understanding of the candidate and the company… without the beer.
With a redefined vision of culture, tech firms can function better, serve broader audiences, engage and attract tech talent with various backgrounds and perspectives, foster a culture of inclusiveness and belonging, and promote innovation with the help of diverse ideas, voices and directions.
Ryan Leary helps create the processes, ideas and innovation that drive RecruitingDaily. He’s RecruitingDaily’s in-house expert for anything related to sourcing, tools or technology. A lead generation and brand buzz building machine, he has built superior funnel systems for some of the industry’s top HR Tech and Recruitment brands. He is a veteran of the online community and a partner at RecruitingDaily.
Hiring for culture fit has been a growing practice in businesses that care about creating a positive workplace culture. There is a proven correlation between the business culture of a company and its financial success, and people are the drivers of both. Hiring for culture fit simply means having the wisdom to find someone who fits into the company culture rather than exclusively looking for certain skills.
But as the concept of culture fit became more popular, it veered into buzzword territory. Many companies that believe they are hiring for culture fit are actually just hiring people they identify and “click” with. When a candidate shares a particular trait, background, or life experience with the hiring manager — think a common sports team or hometown — they mistake alignment between themselves and the candidate for alignment between the candidate and the organization. That’s when culture fit becomes controversial.
It’s important for organizations to reevaluate and ensure that the way they screen for culture fit is giving everyone an equal chance. Here are two perspectives from purpose-driven leaders on how to screen for culture fit well.
Your Gut Is Biased, Hire On Facts
Emily Tetto, VP of Talent & Culture at Acceleration Partners, has one piece of advice for leaders when it comes to hiring for culture fit: never, ever, ever trust your gut.
More often than not, your gut guides you to hire people who are similar to you, which can lead to a homogeneous culture: people with similar backgrounds who think and act in similar ways. This can undermine your organization’s diversity and shut people out based on their backgrounds, which leads to discrimination.
But it’s still important for organizations to get the right people in the right seats. At Acceleration Partners, they’ve replaced hiring for culture fit with screening for cultural attributes.
“We have our core values, and they are: own it, excel and improve, and embrace relationships,” says Tetto. “Those are three different attributes we want to make sure candidates possess and have demonstrated in their previous experience. Those are attributes that can and do cross a wide range of demographics and types of people.”
Consistency and standardization is key. Write job descriptions that clearly articulate key qualities and attributes for the role and use standardized scorecards to evaluate candidates. Putting a system around your hiring process helps eliminate human bias and ensure an equal chance for everyone.
Still, you might find that your hiring managers continue to rely on their gut feeling about candidates during the interview process. When that happens, Tetto encourages leaders to challenge it.
“We have to dig in and ask why. What are the facts? What did you see? What did you hear?” says Tetto. “You have your job descriptions and your scorecards — you know your outcomes and you know what you want. Your gut is biased, hire on facts.”
A 5-Step Framework for Culture Fit
There’s increasing evidence that in many organizations, the idea of culture fit is not being handled responsibly. In her book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, Lauren Rivera highlights her findings after interviewing 120 hiring decision-makers at elite financial, legal, and consulting firms. While 82 percent of managers said fit is one of the most important things that they look for, only half have a clear idea of what their organizational culture is — and only one third say their company has clear tools for measuring fit during the hiring process.
“That’s where culture fit can come into play as a negative force,” says Connor Lynch, EVP and Managing Director at Rescue Agency. “Without a thoughtful process in place, ‘culture fit’ can become very personal and veer into ‘social fit’ — hiring people that you click with or who are like you. Organizations then run a big risk of discriminating against candidates from different backgrounds.”
Lynch recommends organizations build a measurable and consistent framework to screen for culture fit well. Here are the five elements to keep in mind:
Diversity and Inclusion
If we only hire people we “click with,” businesses run the big risk of discriminating against candidates from different backgrounds. Fit doesn’t mean people who share your interests, identities, or personality traits — it’s about finding someone who shares your company’s values and has the right skills and experiences.
Clear Culture
You can't measure fit unless you have a very clear, well-defined understanding of your company culture. How do you assess for the values that matter most to your company?
Culture Should Tie to Strategy
What is your company culture and how does it ladder up to your business strategy? Screen candidates for the attributes and qualities that make your culture — and your business — successful.
Systematic & Measurable
Keep your gut out of your hiring decisions. Develop a system for measuring and rating employee fit and ensure each candidate is run through the same process. Start with tools like behavior assessments and scorecards.
Aside from education and years of experience, what qualifications should the candidate possess? Your job descriptions and interview questions should evaluate candidates holistically for the experiences, skills and qualities of a successful candidate.
I always say to hire the heart and not the head. I base hiring decisions 60 percent on fit and 40 percent on skills. This principle holds true whether you have two employees or 2,000, but it fails without a clearly-defined culture and a consistent process for evaluating candidates for fit.
“Working with people you click with isn’t culture,” says Tetto. “We hire people who have cultural attributes that align with the ‘AP way’ — the culture, values, and beliefs that make our company a great place to work.”
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