Hiring for ‘Culture Fit’ - Why a cookie cutter approach may only be half-baked

“We’re not going to move forward with her. She’s just not a good culture fit.”

How many times have you heard this statement in your interview process? Or has this thought crossed your mind? An organization's culture is its lifeblood - without culture, work becomes a mindless, heartless march toward eternity, with all of us just automatons screwing caps on toothpaste tubes. Only a few years ago, 83% of millennials in the workforce said they wanted the company they worked for to align with their values. With millennials at 35% of the current workforce and reaching 75% of the workforce by 2030, investing in corporate culture is a wise choice.  

Organizational culture is typically defined by observable patterns of behavior in organizations and the expected behavior regarding those values. At Lever Talent, we define an organization’s culture as the minimum required behavior of team members to succeed in your organization. For instance, if your organization values teamwork and you prefer to work alone, you could have a problem. When we strive to meet the minimum required behavior set by the values, we discover if it aligns with our core values. When there's good alignment, we feel empowered and energized; when there's poor alignment, we feel burned out quickly and conflicted. It's in this exchange that the organization's culture is born. When most people are aligned, the culture is vibrant and positive; when there's severe misalignment, the culture can feel toxic.

From a hiring perspective, interviewing for “culture fit” is paramount. Fostering a vibrant culture all starts with finding people who are aligned with your values and are additive to the team. Ensuring that your potential hire aligns with your company's mission, vision, and, most importantly, your values is a great way to ensure they are set up for success and that you’re both headed in the same direction.

The Cookie Cutter Interview

Many companies use their cultural interview like cookie cutters. Using a cultural cookie-cutter interview ensures that every employee aligns with your corporate values and will support the mission and vision of the organization. Sounds great, right?

The cookie-cutter metaphor falls apart because candidates rarely show up to their interview as fresh, untouched dough. They come to us with experiences and values that have helped shape them. Their values are largely defined - their cookie is already shaped and baked. If we press down our corporate cookie cutter, we’ll cut off essential pieces of what makes this person special.

What happens to job candidates when we take a cookie-cutter approach to assess for culture fit:

• They may hide a part of themselves to “fit in.”
• They will not show up to work as their authentic selves, leaving themselves unfulfilled and leaving us with a shell of an employee.
• They may realize this company doesn’t align with their values and leave your process.
• They may break.

Many companies aren’t structured enough regarding their interviewing processes, especially around organizational culture. Rather than asking questions that drill in on specific corporate values and looking for examples of how a person lived into those values previously, interviewers rely on their gut to make decisions about “fit.” This is where the danger lies - unstructured interviews combined with subjective decision-making leads directly to implicit bias infiltrating your interview process. 

Once during an interview debrief, a well-seasoned interviewer said, “She didn’t maintain eye contact with me. She clearly lacks self-confidence and isn’t cut out for this position or this company.” The candidate they were interviewing happened to grow up in a culture where sustained eye contact is viewed as rude, aggressive, and disrespectful. She had everything else we were looking for and had done well in the other interviews, but his conflation of her lack of eye contact with his value of self-confidence caused the interviewer to pass on her candidacy. 

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Oddly enough, over-indexing on making sure that a candidate is “the right fit” for your organization can also negatively impact the current culture. For example, suppose an organization is too focused on bringing in driving, competitive, and assertive candidates so they survive in the company’s fast-paced environment. In that case, they may inadvertently create a dog-eat-dog culture that drives employees to win at all costs, even at the expense of their teammates. This culture focuses on behavior instead of outcomes, creating a whirlpool of negativity from which it is hard to break away. 

On the other hand, focusing too much on a candidate’s positive attitude can engender an environment of toxic positivity where employees feel like they can’t express their struggles and needs. This environment is the antithesis of psychological safety. If people don’t feel like they can communicate their feelings, it is impossible to create a culture built on trust. Without trust, Patrick Lencioni’s team dysfunctions are on full display: an organization cannot experience healthy conflict, may struggle to gain commitment to the cause, cannot hold each other accountable, and might have difficulty reaching meaningful results.

Creating a company with the same “cookies” may mean you don’t experience many values-related conflicts within your organization. Still, it may also dampen innovation and learning. When we create an echo chamber without conflicting opinions, we may never see that there is another, better way of doing things. Company culture needs balance: a healthy mix of different perspectives, personalities, and values. 

Head, Heart, & Briefcase

There are many tools to help us understand our values, like Barrett Values Centre and Via. It is essential not to conflate a person’s values with their behavioral drives. Products like The Predictive Index help organizations to understand their employees’ and candidates’ innate behavioral drives. The PI Hire product allows you to set a behavioral target for a role, then compare a person’s behavioral results to the target, identifying alignment between how a person is wired and the job behaviors that are required, as well as where a person may find they need to stretch themselves for that role. We call this “the head” - a person’s behavioral drives. 

Behavioral drives are static throughout a lifetime. While some people may experience trauma, stress, or a life-changing moment that impacts their drives, the science behind PI says these drives do not change much. What can change is the experience and education a person brings to the job - what we call “the briefcase.” This is knowledge gained through classes, internships, and previous work experiences that they can apply to their work with you. 

The third factor is what we’ve discussed thus far - a person’s values, or “the heart.” You are a collection of your experiences. We are all shaped by our environments and adventures, our parents, guardians, and friends. These ties bind us together and help us develop our sense of self. Unlike a person’s behavioral drives, values are a direct result of our experiences, both positive and negative, and tend to change over time. 

Focus on Culture Add, Not Fit

Every member you add to a team changes the team: they create a new collection of experiences, personalities, and values. A new employee can impact culture - team, department, and even organizationally.

Here are three ways to hire for culture fit that works:

1. Use structured, values-based interview questions: Ask values-based questions that require the candidate to describe how they acted in previous situations. This can help you assess whether their reactions align with your company's culture. Pro-tip: having someone run this interview who won’t directly work with the candidate will provide feedback based specifically on values alignment.
2. Don’t hunt the unicorn: Most of us aren’t perfect, and your candidates won’t be either. You’ll be waiting forever if you search for a unicorn, so knowing what specific attributes you can and cannot live without is a great starting point.
3. Be transparent: Provide the candidate with an honest representation of the company's culture and what is expected of employees. This can help the candidate decide whether they would fit in well with the company's culture.

While we must interview candidates to gain a better understanding of their values and to ensure they align with those of our companies, we would be remiss to pass up candidates who are not cut with the same strict mold as we are. Diverse perspectives and experiences enrich company culture and help reach desired outcomes and results. During your next culture interview, don’t ask if the person will be a culture fit - instead, ask how this person will be a culture addition.