3 ways to restore meaning to "culture fit"
In this blog, we discuss how your meaning of culture fit could be limiting your growth and blocking out those who could enrich your organisation.
Eliott Rayna @ Unsplash
We have all heard the phrase "culture fit" - whether you have said it or it has been said to you, either in a positive or negative way. However, it is very difficult to understand its meaning and its influence in our everyday work life. In general, evaluating whether a candidate is a "culture fit" means figuring out if they can gel with the other people in team and maintain that relationship even when the going gets tough, and if they can embody and project the values of the company to others.
Hiring with "culture fit" in mind is not entirely bad; on the contrary, it can be a great way of creating a cohesive team with people communicating and collaborating effectively. Still, this can only work if you do not have a rigid perception of who may or may not fit your company. Not being aware and purposeful when considering "culture fit" can lead even the most well-intentioned hiring managers to overlook qualified and talented people who would be an incredible asset to their team. Here are three ways to make sure you keep your mind open about growing your team:
Go back to basics
Firstly, it is essential to examine how you establish whether someone fits your organisational culture and what are the principles underpinning this view. Have you got a clear grasp of what your core values are? If so, are you using these values as the foundation of your hiring strategy? Often hiring managers will be aware of the need for putting their company principles in their hiring process, but can be distracted by other characteristics they may wish to see in candidates which are not actually relevant at all, creating a precise template of how the next addition to the team should look, sound and behave. Instead, you should cast aside what the perfect candidate is like for you and go back to the very basics of what is required for the job. Is it really necessary for your colleagues to be knowledgeable about golf to be good co-workers? Or should they really be able to explain why they would fit into a specific Hogwarts house to support you in your day-to-day projects? The core question then is: are you looking for people who share the company values and have the right technical knowledge - or are you looking for people who are like you? Often the line between these two subjects can get blurred and it is not uncommon to hear of hiring managers who did not offer a job to someone because they would not want to have pint at the pub with them. If not attentive to your own thoughts and reasons, this can then turn into wider bias - for example, not hiring someone because they went to a university you are not familiar with, because they didn't go to university at all or because you unfoundedly assume that you will never be able to find common ground with a person with a different cultural background.
Value perspective
Once you have stripped your criteria back to only its relevant and essential factors, it is time to really open your mind to how much value candidates can bring to your workplace. It is useful to have a specific vision of what your principles may look like in real life, but this should not hinder you from appreciating how other people may have a different interpretation of how your principles can be positively embodied. Before deciding whether someone is going to fit your team or not, reflect on whether the differences you identified between yourself or other members of your team and the candidate really mean you are inherently incompatible. Taking the different perspective that others might bring and labelling them as "unsuited" without first truly thinking about how they may expand or improve your own attitude to work is a disservice to yourself and your organisation. You could even have the candidates support you in understanding this - for example, by first being open about your own management or working style and asking direct questions about how the candidates would approach collaboration with you, allowing them to tell you what new perspectives and approaches they can bring to your team.
Be honest
Lastly, it is indispensable that you are truly transparent about the factors your final hiring decision rests on. There is no doubt that hiring with a rigid culture fit lens increases the chances of disregarding people who would be amazing additions to your teams. However, going back to basics and valuing perspective can still not be enough to have carried out a genuinely inclusive hiring process. In particular, doing the process on your own can allow some of your own perceptions to go unchallenged and never really unblock what has stopped you from building diverse teams so far. When hiring, it is necessary to be candid about the reasons a person is or isn't going to be part of your team - towards yourself, your team, but also towards the candidate. For example, you can be honest by providing detailed feedback to the unsuccessful candidates who have taken the time to prepare and attend an interview. It is easy to to tell them they were not a "culture fit", but this is entirely unhelpful to the candidate as it leaves them wondering what the phrase really means to you and whether it is a way to obfuscate unethical hiring practices.
Making your hiring process truly transparent can ensure your values are reflected in your company at all levels and leave everyone who engages with you with the knowledge that you truly work by those principles. It is a big but rewarding task and which we want to support organisation to do effectively. Here is what Phil McMinn at Torchbox had to say on working with us to recruit an SEO Expert:
"Our work with Collaborative Future gave us a real chance to go back to basics with how we recruit. Tessa and the team made us rethink everything we'd done before—from using CVs to how we asked candidates to demonstrate their skillset during the interview, it was all up for debate. Our biases came out think and fast, but Tessa was never judgemental about them, and she created a space and an environment for the Torchbox team to talk openly about the things we brought to the recruitment process as interviewers that limited our ability to get to the heart of a candidate's core skillset. The process involved unlearning a decade of interviewing practices, but we're all the better for doing so."