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Key Takeaways

Right Skills, Right Vibes: Hiring is not just about skills but about candidates thriving in your company culture.

Culture Fit Fever: Debate about hiring for 'culture fit' focuses on candidates who mesh well with the existing team.

Adding Spice to the Mix: Hiring for 'culture add' means bringing in fresh, new perspectives to enhance the company's culture.

Hiring isn’t just about finding someone with the right skills—it's about finding someone who will thrive in your company's culture.

The debate between hiring for "culture fit" versus "culture add" has gained momentum, as companies strive to build teams that not only work well together but also bring fresh perspectives. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the nuances of hiring for culture fit and culture add, and how striking the right balance can lead to a more dynamic, innovative workplace.

What Do We Mean By Hiring For Culture Fit

So how do you define culture fit? It’s about reflecting your company values, adding to the conversation, and bringing a perspective that gets to the best answer, not cookie-cutter candidates. 

If you find yourself thinking “they remind me of me” or “I would like to have a beer with them”, you’re probably looking at this person for the role for the wrong reasons.  

A well-rounded team will not just come to the best decisions but also come up with new ways of approaching problems and identifying new opportunities. How we as human beings think is largely shaped by our experiences in life. Different backgrounds and different experiences, therefore, bring not just new perspectives, but new approaches to addressing problems and building solutions. 

What you’re looking for is a balance on a team. You need different personalities. Some people who will push you forward and others will take a minute to think through the impact of a decision. Each of them has value at different times. 

But to do this well requires a focus on how to define “culture fit” for your team and avoid biases in hiring. How we do that, is through focusing on the culture add element. If you do it well, you will be able to promote your culture in a way that will help you attract amazing talent from a variety of different backgrounds.

Hiring for culture fit is more effective when recruiters have completed certified recruiter programs focused on modern workplace dynamics.

Why Do Companies Hire For Culture Fit?

You want people who will work well with others on your team. If you are a fast-paced business, you want someone who can work at your speed without losing quality. If you have created a collaborative environment, you want to know you have hired someone who will not work in a silo.   

This is what hiring for culture fit really means. 

Unfortunately, what sometimes can happen is that it turns into hiring too much sameness - they look like me, think like me, act like me, come from a similar background, seem cool to hang out with, all superficial things that won’t drive the business forward and will hold the team back from growing.

There is now vendors who claim to have created recruiting software that can assess cultural fit, but turning this over to technology is not something that comes with inherent risks. Some recruiting software offers benefits around bias detection, but that may not be enough in assessing if someone's a culture fit or add.

Importance of culture fit in the workplace

It’s a tough balance. More and more companies are focusing on culture add versus culture fit. You want someone who will add something new to your organization, and become another ambassador or champion of your culture. Someone who will continue to bring it to life, be a role model, and carry it forward….even help evolve it as the company grows.

Culture exists to help grow the business. A healthy team that knows how to work together, with similar values, will push the business forward, bring new ideas, and suggest new processes in a way that reflects the way the team works together.

Some of the perceived benefits of hiring for culture fit include increased engagement, team cohesion, and reduced turnover.

Historical Context

Hiring for culture fit is nothing new, it goes back as far as the 1980s when companies started to operate under a philosophy that if a person’s personality or values matched, or at least meshed with a company’s strategy and mission, they’d be more attached to their jobs, more likely to stay with the company and more dedicated to their work. 

Since then, companies have been focused more on building a strong culture and hiring people that reflect that culture.

The issue is that in some industries, this turned into a culture of sameness, more focused on personality, likeability, and comfort than skill and this leads to some significant consequences, including:

  • Lack of a diversity recruiting strategy that accounts for experience and thought as well as demographics
  • Sameness in thought and experiences 
  • The removal of people who push others to think outside of the box or just differently (if we all have the same experiences, how can we be creative and innovative).

What Is A Culture Add? 

The culture fit concept has largely morphed into what we now call a culture add, where the focus is finding people who can continue to help us evolve as an organization and will bring new ideas in a way that reflects our values.

It may not be someone who comes from a company like yours. Companies in the same industry or who started in a similar place (but are now larger, as an example) may not reflect your culture anymore.

It’s easy to get excited about a company or school on a resume, but they may not be the right hire for your company at this time.

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Shift in terminology and thinking

The goal with culture add is to take away from the sameness and the idea that you have to conform to us.

Of course, it still means you need to demonstrate our values, but it encourages more diversity of thought. You don’t need to fit into our culture, you need to demonstrate our culture and be able to help us move forward by adding to our culture

Benefits of culture add

  • Enhanced creativity and innovation
  • Increased engagement through dynamic conversations and new solution-oriented ideas
  • Improved company resilience 

Pro tip: Choosing the right interview management tool can streamline the process of hiring candidates who fit your company culture.

How To Build A Culture Add Approach Into Hiring

If you want to hire people who will add something to your company culture, it helps to first have a handle on what it is their adding to. Your company culture can be shown in a variety of actions or be characterized in a number of ways, but it typically comes back to some core philosophies that don’t change. 

Let’s take a look at how you define culture. 

Defining Your Company Culture

Culture is based on your values and how you work together as a team. But it’s also very much a reality, not an ideal. 

With that in mind, your culture needs to be rooted in reality. You can’t say you have a transparent company but then never communicate uncomfortable news or bottom line details with the team. Nor can you say you have a collaborative culture but not have systems in place to help people work together.

What you say and what you do have to match and being honest about what the culture is like is an important part of identifying what’s good about it, what needs to change, and what’s unique. 

Role of mission, vision, and values in defining culture.

All of that leads to how you work together as a team, how you make decisions, how you communicate, what you expect of each other, how you work through conflict.

The mission and vision are the north star but the values are then about how you behave in order to achieve those goals.

Developing culture add interview questions

Any culture fit interview needs to be based on competencies that reflect your values.  This will avoid the “I like them” decision.

For example, let’s say one of your values is authenticity. Speaking about the person’s integrity will reflect that. If you have a value about moving fast or scrappiness, developing interview questions that deal with their ability to cope with ambiguity will capture that value.

Using competencies keeps it rooted in the role, the workplace, and makes it more objective.

Here are some other common questions that are asked: 

Company Value: Innovation

  • Question: "Our company values innovative thinking. Can you share a time when you came up with a creative solution to a challenging problem? How did you implement it, and what was the result?"
  • Purpose: This question encourages the candidate to discuss their ability to think outside the box and drive change, reflecting the company’s commitment to innovation.

Company Value: Collaboration

  • Question: "Collaboration is at the heart of our success. Can you describe a situation where you worked closely with a diverse team to achieve a common goal? How did you ensure that everyone’s input was valued?"
  • Purpose: This question assesses the candidate’s experience with integrating diverse perspectives into their work and their ability to foster a collaborative environment.

Company Value: Integrity

  • Question: "Can you tell me about a time when you faced an ethical dilemma at work? How did you handle it, and what was the outcome?"
  • Purpose: This question prompts the candidate to demonstrate their commitment to ethical behavior and honesty.

Company Value: Continuous Learning

  • Question: "Can you give an example of a skill or knowledge area you’ve developed recently? How has this new knowledge impacted your work?"
  • Purpose: This question highlights the candidate’s commitment to self-improvement and staying updated with industry trends to assess how well they'll do in a culture of learning.

Company Value: Customer Focus

  • Question: "Can you share an experience where you went above and beyond to meet a customer’s needs? What steps did you take to ensure their satisfaction?"
  • Purpose: This question encourages the candidate to discuss their approach to customer service, showing how they align with the company’s focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Best Practices for Conducting Culture Fit Interviews

As with any interview, have questions to ask about a time they demonstrated that competency, what they learned, what they would have done differently, for dealing with ambiguity. For example, let’s go back to that fast-paced culture example: 

  • Tell me about a time you had to start a project without all the information you needed. 
  • Tell me about a time when you were working on a project and you had to change course in the middle.

You are looking for someone who was able to handle the uncertainty, work with what they had, someone who didn’t need perfection to move forward and was nimble enough to adjust along the way.

That is someone who will reflect your culture of scrappiness or moving quickly.

Utilizing assessment tools

While some personality assessments may be helpful for you to identify areas to probe more during an interview, most are not certified to be used in interviewing to make a final decision so be careful with these.

They can also lead to similar personalities being hired.   

“We move fast” does not necessarily mean you want another high D from DiSC on your team.   You actually may need a high S to help bring calm to the chaos. You just need that S to be willing to move fast as well.

As you conduct pre-employment testing, you can look for a work style that is unique to the person or see how their experience comes through in the work and assess what that might add to the culture, but be careful how you heavily you weight this in the decision making process as it may diminish as they integrate into your culture.

Tip: Pre-employment assessment tools can help by providing customizable tests and automating scoring and reporting.

Involving the team

A collaborative hiring process will help you gain input from your team when hiring and ensure that the team is trained and prepped before meeting candidates.

They should know how to conduct a behavioral interview, how to avoid legal pitfalls, understand the expectations of the role, and what they should be focusing on in their interview.

Additional training on biases and being open to different perspectives is helpful in general, but will also help avoid hiring for culture fit for the wrong reasons.

People who have been recognized for being culture champions are good candidates for conducting the culture fit interview. This allows for someone outside of the hiring team to interview for the culture perspective and will help avoid the sameness pitfall since they are also representing a different team.

This has also proven exciting for the candidates as they meet different people across the company.

Challenges And Solutions In Hiring For Culture Add

If you want to source candidates and ultimately hire people who can make a unique contribution to your organizational culture, here are some things you’ll need to be able to do. 

Recognizing diverse perspectives

Emphasize the importance of evaluating candidates based on the unique skills and viewpoints they bring to the table. 

Develop criteria and structure feedback mechanisms that help your people focus on how a candidate’s experiences and background can enhance the company culture.

Implement structured interview techniques that encourage candidates to discuss their unique strengths and potential contributions and consider using a collaborative hiring process to help you get a more complete view of the candidate from multiple people within your team. 

Measuring culture add objectively

Utilize assessment tools that identify how candidates' unique skills and perspectives align with and enhance the company’s core values. Today’s recruiting software offers a plethora of features that can help you mitigate bias, but ultimately the biggest weapon you have in battling bias is your culture. 

Candid conversations about the cultural add and fit potential of a candidate will help you or your team refine your processes, identify spots where bias does creep in to your hiring, and implement behavioral and situational interview questions that reveal how candidates can add to the existing culture.

Communicating culture to candidates

Start by being transparent about your company's values, particularly your commitment to ideals like inclusion and belonging.

Showcase how your organization actively promotes an inclusive work environment where diverse perspectives are valued and celebrated, not through some cheesy video, but with real life examples of how your team developed a product or solution.

Role of employer branding in attracting culture-add candidates

Your employer brand plays a crucial role in attracting candidates who will add to and enhance your company culture. Develop a brand that reflects the value your organization places on diverse contributions and unique perspectives.

This includes crafting a consistent narrative that highlights how your company fosters a collaborative environment and leveraging recruitment marketing strategies and social media platforms to share how your company embraces a culture add approach.

Post content showcasing your teams and the work they're doing, share testimonials from employees about their experiences, and highlight specific programs or initiatives that focus on inclusivity and innovation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What does hiring for culture fit mean?

Hiring for culture fit means selecting candidates who align with your company’s values, beliefs, and work environment. It’s about finding individuals who will not only thrive within the existing culture but also contribute positively to it. The goal is to build a team that works well together and shares a common vision, ensuring that new hires are comfortable and productive from the start.

How can I ensure diversity while hiring for culture fit?

Ensuring diversity while hiring for culture fit requires a focus on both inclusivity and open-mindedness. Instead of seeking candidates who are similar to your current employees, look for those who bring different perspectives and experiences that align with your company’s values. Emphasize “culture add” rather than “culture fit,” aiming to enhance your culture with diverse viewpoints. Additionally, establish clear, unbiased criteria for evaluating candidates and train hiring managers to recognize and avoid unconscious bias.

How do I communicate my company culture to candidates?

Communicating your company culture to candidates starts with clear, consistent messaging across all touchpoints. This includes your company website, job descriptions, and social media channels. During the interview process, provide examples of how your culture is lived out daily, such as through team activities, communication styles, or company policies. Encourage candidates to ask questions and offer them opportunities to meet potential colleagues, so they can get a feel for the environment. Sharing stories from current employees about their experiences can also effectively convey what your culture is all about.

Can culture fit be measured objectively?

Measuring culture fit objectively is challenging because it often involves subjective judgments about how well a candidate’s personality, values, and behaviors align with the company. However, you can introduce some objectivity by developing a set of criteria based on your company’s core values and desired competencies. Structured interviews, behavioral assessments, and cultural fit surveys can also help in assessing candidates more consistently. It’s important to combine these tools with a focus on “culture add” to ensure that you’re not just hiring people who are similar to your current team, but those who will enrich and diversify your culture.

Karen Weeks

Karen has focused the last 20+ years on building amazing cultures within organizations so that individuals can ignite their careers. She cares about people's development so much that she is the Global Chief People Officer at Obviously, a VMLY&R company, and founded the coaching business, Shine at Work™. She hosts the career development podcast, also called “Shine at Work”, and is the author of “Setting the Stage: A Guide to Preparing for Any Feedback Conversation”. As a corporate speaker, she enjoys sharing stories and actionable advice so that people can shine at work and in life.