Weighing-up “On Paper” Fit with Company Culture Fit of Candidates
Finding the perfect hire can be a challenge. One difficulty hiring managers face is weighing up the skills and experience of a candidate against how well they think they’ll fit in at the company.
This has led to a focus on “culture fit” when hiring for new positions. However, many people are confused about exactly what that encompasses and about how much value they should put on culture fit as oppose to “on paper” skills.
In this blog, we discuss exactly what culture fit is, why it’s important to consider in addition to candidate skills and experience, and how to use it correctly in a hiring situation.
What Is Culture Fit?
The culture fit of candidates has become an important consideration during the hiring process for many companies, but a wrong definition of culture fit is often used. This incorrect definition focuses on judging a candidate’s personality rather than their ability to work effectively in the work environment that the hiring company exhibits.
Culture fit should also not be judged by personal connection to a candidate. If you like the person (ex. Could see them being a friend) this doesn’t mean they’re a good culture fit necessarily. This is the primary reason for bias and poor hiring.
When assessing culture fit, you should focus more on the candidate’s values, work ethic, and processes, and if those adhere to the company’s environment.
One thing you may look at is how the candidate accomplishes things. Do their methods mirror how your current team handles tasks? If not, try to determine how open they would be to undertaking tasks using the company’s approach.
Culture fit is an important metric to consider as having values that are aligned with the company will make employees feel more attached to their job. This will result in them working diligently and staying with the company for a long period.
Culture fit should not be judged by personal connection to a candidate. Liking the person doesn’t indicate a good culture fit.
Culture Fit vs. Skill Fit - Which is More Important?
Ultimately, both skill/experience fit and culture fit are important. Completely ignoring culture fit means that you aren’t thinking about how the candidate will perform in your company environment.
You can find the most qualified candidate based on skills and experience, but if they don’t work well within your current team, that talent is wasted. You won’t get the results you expected from them and there can be animosity and unhappiness between the old team and the new hire, resulting in a tense work environment.
Up to 50% of new hires leave within a year to 18 months due to a bad culture fit, so it’s absolutely something you need to keep in mind when hiring.
You want to find a candidate that’s qualified but is also excited about your company goals and values and is open to working in the type of structure your team does.
When hiring, you should think about the candidate's motivations and values more than personality. If these motivations and values are aligned with the company motivations and values then the candidate will likely be a good fit even if their personality and personal background are different from other employees.
The Pros and Cons of Prioritizing Culture Fit During Hiring
Pros of Prioritizing Culture Fit
Assessing culture fit is always necessary. Aligning employee and company values makes employees happier, more productive, and less likely to leave.
One argument against considering culture fit in hiring is that it reduces workforce diversity. But this doesn’t need to be the case as long as you focus on the original culture fit definition of aligned values and work processes instead of basing it on personality and lifestyle.
Using culture fit in hiring decisions also shouldn’t affect innovation. If a team has the same values and motivations but come from different professional and personal backgrounds, then forming ideas and innovating extensively is still very possible.
Additionally, too much focus on skills and experience alone can result in bad hiring and employees leaving early into their contract. You do need to consider overall fit and not be afraid to train a new hire a little more if they have values that align greatly with company values but lack some experience.
Even if they have a great deal of experience, all new hires need to be trained to do things the way your team does. A little extra time spent with a less experienced new hire that’s a great all-around fit can be better than hiring a more experienced candidate who doesn’t mesh with your team’s way of doing things.
Focusing just on skills because you don’t want to spend much time on training can result in you missing out on the perfect candidate.
Aligning employee and company values makes employees happier, more productive, and less likely to leave.
Cons of Prioritizing Culture Fit
If defined incorrectly, focusing on culture fit can contribute to diversity bias. This is negative because there are many benefits to having a diverse workforce. Diversity doesn’t just relate to race and gender, although these are important, but also to personality types and personal backgrounds.
A workforce made up of less diverse people can hinder innovation as all employees will have similar lifestyles and backgrounds. This makes it more likely that they’ll think similarly, resulting in ideas and points of view being homogeneous.
If culture fit is used incorrectly and decisions are made relating to personality traits, for example, favoring those who are outgoing, you risk hindering the creation of a diversified workforce. You’re also likely to not be choosing the best all-around candidate.
Someone who seems quieter, for example, may perform the job much better and are likely to come out of their shell as they get to know other employees. You could be missing out on perfect hire by putting too much emphasis on the inaccurate definition of culture fit.
How to Use Culture Fit Effectively When Hiring
Those hiring will firstly need to understand their biases to combat them while interviewing. A good way to do this is through a test. A popular choice is Harvard’s Implicit Association Test. This is free to take and asks a range of questions on different areas of bias to determine your level of bias for each.
Try to answer as honestly as possible and if you ask other interviewers to take the test, make sure they can keep the information private.
Additionally, consider the following to help you use culture fit effectively as a hiring category.
Create a Culture Fit Checklist or Candidate Persona
Don’t hire for culture fit based on a gut feeling. You need a set way to assess how each candidate you interview aligns with your company values.
To do this, you first need to determine what your company’s culture encompasses. What makes your current team successful? What characteristics do your best hires possess? For the latter, these would not so much be skills but instead relate to values and work ethic.
Use this information to create a culture fit checklist just as you’ll have a checklist of skills and experience for each position you hire for. You can also create a complete candidate persona. This will include both what skills and experience they need to possess and the culture criteria.
Include considerations like analyzing how they interact with team members, their communication style, their work ethic, and their values and beliefs.
Use interviews to determine if candidates have these qualities. Try to ask about these values through more open-ended questions.
For instance, if your employees sometimes need to work late nights or on weekends to meet deadlines, don’t ask if the candidate is open to this. This is a simple yes/no close-ended question and most candidates will say “yes” to appease the interviewers even if they’ll show resistance to this when hired.
Use questions that get a “yes” response on their own. For example, discuss if they’re used to tight deadlines, how they handle these, and how they go the extra mile to meet deadlines.
This will naturally bring out some responses that mention candidates are happy to work overtime (or have worked overtime) to meet deadlines. It’s then more likely that these candidates won’t have issues when working overtime if hired.
You need a set way to assess how candidates align with your company values.
Use Behavioral Interview Questions
Use lots of behavioral interview questions to help assess culture fit. These focus on how candidates have handled professional situations in the past. Using this type of question allows you to understand more about how the candidate works.
Additionally, think about the answer you’d ideally like to hear. You can also practice these questions with your top performers to see what responses they provide and then look for similar responses from candidates.
Consider an Informal Discussion or Trial Task
It also may be easier to judge culture fit in an informal setting. After interviewing candidates, shortlist the top ones to have an informal discussion with. Or, you could get them to spend some time with your team working on a task to see how they fit in.
In Conclusion
Ultimately both experience and culture fit are important to consider when hiring. However, culture fit needs to relate to the candidate’s values and professional behavior as opposed to being solely personality-based.
When used incorrectly and candidate personality is taken too much into consideration, you can end up with a hire that doesn’t work well with your team and will likely leave early, even if they possess all the skills needed for the job.
If used correctly to really determine how an employee will fit into your team, then you can end up with someone that fits in well and adds lots of value to your operations, even if they need a bit of extra training up front.
If you’re having trouble finding the perfect fit for an open position, get in touch with the team here at Lynne Palmer to help you in your candidate search. We have decades of experience connecting highly qualified candidates with jobs in the publishing, media, and medical communications industries.