Is culture fit as important as we seem to think? A casual Google search brings up hundreds of articles espousing the benefits of culture fit. Supposedly, people that match our values and have similar characteristics to our top performers are more productive and stay longer.
Defining culture is not as simple as it seems. Many corporations espouse a set of values, and the belief is that these values create the culture. Therefore, the best candidates are those who are aligned with those values. But in reality, most organizations do not practice the values they espouse, and individual functions and departments within an organization may have even different values.
For example, the engineering function may operate on entirely different values than human resources or the company. And corporate values are very often nebulous and unarticulated.
I frequently hear from candidates who met all the requirements for the job, even had a positive interview, and are then rejected because they did not fit the culture. Is this just an easy way for a recruiter to reject someone? How is this not blatant prejudice?
How do we define culture fit anyway? And what research backs up the belief that culture fit is so important?
The research is mostly anecdotal and not based on data. Objective data is hard to get because our definitions of culture and cultural fit are vague and inconsistent. They vary from company to company, and sub-cultures within organizations may be more important than the overall company culture.
When we read articles and watch videos explaining how those who fit a corporate culture are more productive and stay longer than those who do not, we do not know what definition was used to determine their fit. How did they compare these “good fit” people to the “bad fit” ones? What were the values that were missing? How were they measured? There are too many unknowns to make any conclusions believable or objective.
And culture is far more than just values. It is also the way people make decisions, the way people communicate, and the habits and ways of thinking that have evolved. The values may have been those of the founders (think Steve Jobs at Apple or Bill Gates at Microsoft). Do we expect everyone to have the same values and act the same way?
Ed Schein, an MIT professor, pioneered the academic understanding of corporate culture and wrote one of the first books about it.
He defines culture as the accumulated learning of a person’s background, country, company, workgroup, and occupation. Corporate values are interpreted by how people act and get work done. Values vary from department to department and between professions. Finance people often have a different culture than engineers, for example.
Having a straightforward definition of culture and then using it to screen candidates is impossible. Culture and cultural fit are too complex to be defined well or unearthed in an interview or through a test.
I am concerned that recruiters and hiring managers use a simplistic definition of corporate culture and cultural fit to reinforce their biases. Hiring managers, recruiters, and senior leaders have stereotypes about what makes a good candidate. They have beliefs about cultural background, education levels, schools people attended, grades achieved, and activities participated in. They may favor people from one organization over another.
“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.“–Katherin Klein
At best, we pick out those indicators that align with those we already believe are important. When we say a candidate is not a fit, it is often a thinly disguised code for not hiring someone who does not fit our bias.
By rejecting people who are different or do not think the same as we do, we risk reducing the diversity of thought that creates change and drives innovation. We know that organizations rarely successfully navigate the uncertain future without diverse ideas and people who challenge the status quo.
There are other questions as well about cultural fit. For example, how important is culture fit when hiring remote workers or workers in different countries? Is it important that temporary workers fit the culture?
Wouldn’t it perhaps be better to focus on finding people whose motivation, interests, and skills are a good match for the position offered and forget this pseudo-psychology?
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