Beyond the Resume: Hiring for a Cultural Fit

The Importance of a Culture Fit when Hiring

If you’re a business owner or manager who wants to build a positive, strong company/team culture, it’s crucial to ensure that new hires have the right attributes, skills, and personality to align with and contribute to the company culture. Hiring someone who doesn’t fit the company culture is a recipe for costly bad hires and a disjointed workplace.

What is “Company Culture?”

How do we define company culture? A company’s culture is intangible but immediately felt; invisible, but clearly seen. It goes beyond Christmas parties or Friday cocktail hour. Company culture represents the living, breathing persona of a company, capturing the norms, values, and behaviors that define the very character of your business—a collective identity that functions as the invisible glue that holds (or doesn’t hold) teams together.

When its good, company culture motivates employees, reduces turnover, drives talented, like-minded individuals to your business, and connects you with clients who share your vision. Poor company culture results in employee disengagement, high turnover, and frequent recruitment costs, slowing down the trajectory of your business.

Hiring for a Cultural Fit?

First, it’s important to pause and identify your unique company/team culture—what you like and what you don’t like about it. Developing a company’s culture is much like going to the gym. Positive change is seen incrementally as a result of consistency, vision, and clear goals. If you see it moving in a direction you don’t like, small changes can be made to bring it back on track. Unlike the gym, a single bad decision or hire can drastically change company culture.

One of the common pitfalls in the hiring process is simply matching a job description to a candidate’s technical skills. Job descriptions typically focus on the roles and responsibilities; they list necessary experience and technical skills, but that’s as far as they go. It’s important to remember that every job exists within the context of a unique organization.

For example, two companies can exist in the same industry and have many of the same goals, but approach work differently, fueled by different motivations. It’s crucial to understand what makes your business successful, identify the traits of people who do well there, and hire candidates whose work style and values align with the environment.

How to Evaluate a Good Culture Fit

No one has a crystal ball, and at the end of the day, we’re dealing with people, and even the best business leaders and talented head-hunter’s get it wrong sometimes. Here are a couple of simple things I’ve observed over the years and employed in my practice that have drastically increased the chances of making a good hire and finding a good cultural fit.

• Define Your Core Values

Make sure your culture is clearly communicated. Does your company value innovation, or is it more conservative in its approach? Does it value collaboration or autonomy? Is your organization hierarchical or flat, formal or casual? Is your culture collaborative, creative, competitive? What do your customers say, or what do you want them to say about your organization? Identifying your business's unique culture will allow you to identify those attributes in candidates that best serve your business.

• Look Beyond Skills

Once you’ve identified your company or team's core values, it’s time to look for them in your candidate. Skills can be taught, but values and qualities are deeply ingrained. Hiring for cultural alignment ensures your new employee will not only lead but also inspire and reinforce the behaviors that drive your business forward.

• The Interview

It’s not an interview—it’s a date. While we hope it’s not actually a date (or you might be hearing from HR), it is the first step in what is potentially a long-term relationship with lasting effects—either negative or positive. People are often nervous in interviews, and they usually prepare beforehand. I like to start an interview by talking about something completely unrelated to the job. Ask them how their weekend was or comment on something interesting that you noticed on their resume or LinkedIn: (maybe you went to the same school, or you saw that they volunteer at a specific organization). Even shy people like to talk about themselves, and if you can get the interviewee to relax, you’ll get more honest answers and be in a better position to evaluate their suitability for the role.

I often ask candidates to tell me what they understand the job to be and to tell me a little bit about the company. I’m not trying to put them on the spot, but it gives me a sense of how much they want the role. Even if they have an imperfect understanding, it will give you a sense of their level of preparation, which is often directly tied to how they will function in the role.

While hiring is not a perfect science, employing these few points will, I hope, help you make better and fewer hires while improving your business or team’s unique culture. Over the years, I’ve conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of screening calls and interviews. I’ve included some of my favorite questions—I hope they help.

My Favorite Interview Questions:

• What most appeals to you about this role?
• I can appreciate you wanting to speak positively about your previous company. What did you like most/least about your last company?
• What three things do you need to succeed in this position?
• At the end of 90 days, what will make you feel like taking this job has been a good move?
• How do you prefer to communicate with coworkers?
• How do you give/respond to critique?
• Can you tell us about a leader you’ve worked with in the past that you really admire and why?
• When was the last time you took a risk professionally?
• What advice would you give to someone starting out in your career?
• How do you stay organized?
• Tell me about someone that you’ve helped recently?

I hope this short article was helpful, happy hiring!

- Tom Hiebert