Culture Fit vs. Culture Add: What to Know Before Hiring

Takeaways

• Hiring for culture fit may reinforce homogeneity and limit innovation.
• Recognizing and mitigating culture fit bias is crucial to creating a more inclusive workplace.
• Hiring for culture add brings diverse perspectives and skills, enhancing creativity, problem-solving, and adaptability.

Culture Fit vs. Culture Add

Let’s start with a few definitions.?

Culture fit refers to alignment between an existing organizational culture and a job candidate’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. Companies that hire for culture fit want to hire employees who share commonalities with their existing team.?

When hiring for culture add, companies look for candidates whose core values align with the company, but who have diverse perspectives, skills, and experiences they can bring to the table. Rather than seeking new hires who fit into the current mold, hiring managers who embrace culture add want to expand and enrich the cultural fabric of the organization.

Imagine you’re a hotel manager interviewing candidates for a front desk assistant role. One candidate, a culture fit, attended the same university as the hiring manager, shares similar hobbies like hiking and photography, and values great guest interactions. The other candidate, a culture add, brings experience from a diverse hospitality background in cruise ship customer service, fluent in multiple languages, and skilled in handling international guests. Both candidates prioritize exceptional guest service, but the second candidate brings new expertise and fresh perspectives that could enhance guest experiences and expand the hotel’s service capabilities.

In the business world, hiring more culture adds can enhance team performance and broaden your company’s perspectives and skills.

What Is Culture Fit Bias?

Culture fit bias occurs when hiring decisions are heavily influenced by a candidate’s similarity to the existing team, even if other candidates are better qualified.

This bias can occur with obvious traits such as race, nationality, gender, or gender expression or less obvious traits like hobbies, backgrounds, personalities, and similar interests.?

Culture fit bias can be subtle. For instance, a hiring manager might prefer a candidate with a particular sense of humor over another equally capable candidate who communicates differently. Judgments based on how a candidate dresses during the interview might reflect a bias towards those who conform to the existing team’s dress code or style—potentially disadvantageous to equally qualified candidates with different fashion preferences.

Examples of Culture Fit Bias

When taking steps to incorporate objective and inclusive hiring practices, consider these examples of culture fit bias that might be at play in your company.?

1. ?The Cultural Preference Bias

Managers might favor candidates from certain cultural backgrounds. This bias can limit the employee pool to only those who align with the cultural norms of the existing workforce.?

Even when a hiring manager has no explicit cultural preference, implicit biases often emerge due to the byproduct of cultural factors. For instance, cultural differences in emotional expression affect how candidates present themselves during interviews. One American Psychological Association study found that U.S. employers are more likely to favor candidates who appear excited during interviews over those who appear calm and composed. This put European-American applicants at an advantage over Chinese-American applicants.?

2. ?The Background Bias

Hiring managers often subconsciously prefer candidates with shared experiences, favoring those with similar educations, work experiences, or hobbies. For example, they might prefer candidates from specific universities, academic programs, or industries.?

Managers might also favor candidates who share their personal interests, like outdoor activities or playing golf, even if these interests are irrelevant to job performance.??

3. ?The Personality Alignment Bias?

Hiring decisions can be swayed by a candidate’s personality traits as well, with hiring managers more likely to overlook candidates with the necessary skills and qualifications if the candidates have personality traits that aren’t a match.?

Some teams base hiring decisions on questions such as, “Would I enjoy drinking a beer with this person?” This puts more introverted candidates at a disadvantage, even if they have the technical and interpersonal skills for the job.?

Benefits of Hiring for Culture Add

The trend of hiring for culture add instead of culture fit is usually described as “culture fit vs. culture add,” but the two are not mutually exclusive. When hiring for culture add, hiring managers do indeed look for candidates who share their core values. In other words, they build teams who share values and bring something new to the table.??

Hiring for culture add can enhance creativity, broaden your team’s skill set, create a more inclusive environment, and improves your team’s decision-making—without sacrificing the shared set of core values that your company needs to build a positive company culture .?

Benefit #1: Enhanced Creativity

When team members have different backgrounds and experiences, they’re more likely to develop unique solutions to problems.?

Let’s return to our hotel scenario. Whereas the culture fit candidate will adapt seamlessly to the hotel’s existing service protocols and might suggest familiar approaches to guest issues, the culture add candidate will bring fresh perspectives from their experience in luxury cruise customer service.?

For instance, while the culture fit candidate may prefer traditional guest service methods, the culture add candidate could introduce innovative ways to enhance guest experiences, such as personalized check-in rituals or unique amenities tailored to international travelers. This diversity of ideas ensures that the hotel can offer a broader range of solutions to meet guest needs effectively.

Benefit #2: Improved Capabilities

Hiring for culture add can introduce new skills and experiences that enhance your team’s overall capabilities. Sometimes, this diversity of skills can even help disrupt an industry.?

Consider, for instance, ride-share companies, which emerged when technological innovations were merged into a traditional taxicab model. Manufacturing industries have been changed forever because of 3D printing; the hospitality industry evolved to include vacation home rentals, and education is in the process of being disrupted by social media.

Regardless of whether your industry is disrupted, new information and new skill sets are required for it to evolve.?

And where will you get this diversity of skills necessary in rapidly changing industries where adaptability is key? Likely, these new skill sets will come from someone you’ve not yet hired but whose skill will enhance your company’s overall skill set.?

Benefit #3: More Inclusive Environments

Emphasizing culture add also promotes an inclusive workplace where differences are valued. This leads to higher employee satisfaction and retention.?

Today’s employees—and particularly younger employees—want to work for employers who care about their well-being and who respect them as individuals. When workers feel as if they are just another cog in the machine, employers face issues related to quiet quitting , coffee badging , and absenteeism .

On the other hand, when employees feel that their unique contributions are recognized and appreciated, they’re more likely to be engaged and committed to the organization.

By hiring for culture add, individual employees see that they’re free to be their authentic selves at work—so long as they share the company’s core values. Beyond that, you’ll cement your legal commitment to being an equal opportunity employer .?

Benefit #4: Better Decision Making

Studies have shown that diverse groups make better decisions because they’re less prone to groupthink and more likely to evaluate different options. After all, the more diverse a team is, the more likely it is to consider multiple angles of a problem, leading to more comprehensive and effective solutions.?

Think of it like this: Imagine that all the options to solve a problem in your workforce are represented on a giant multi-colored beach ball being held by your employees. If your employees have similar characteristics, they will likely see the beach ball from the same perspective. As a result, they’ll think that the only solution is red.?

But if you have a diverse team, each person will likely look at the beach ball from a different perspective. As a result, your team can consider options including teal blue, maroon, and chartreuse.?

5 Steps To Hire for Culture Add

Here are some practical steps to incorporate culture add into your hiring process:

1. ? Revisit Your Culture

Clearly define the core values that all employees must share but remain open to how these values can be expressed through diverse experiences and perspectives. Emphasize the importance of diversity and inclusion in your organizational culture.

2. ? Provide Bias Training

Provide training for hiring managers to recognize and mitigate their unconscious biases. This can help ensure that decisions are based on objective criteria rather than subjective preferences.

3. ? Rely on Structured Interviews

Use structured interviews with standardized questions to evaluate candidates consistently and fairly. This helps ensure that all candidates are assessed based on the same criteria, reducing the influence of bias.

4. ? Leverage Diverse Hiring Panels

Include a diverse range of employees in the hiring process to ensure multiple viewpoints are considered. This can help identify candidates who can add to the culture in ways that a homogenous panel might overlook.

5. ? Write Inclusive Job Descriptions

Craft job postings and write job requirements that focus on essential skills and experiences, avoiding language that might deter diverse candidates. Highlight the value of diverse perspectives and encourage candidates from different backgrounds to apply.

Culture Add Interview Questions

To effectively hire for culture add while still hiring employees who align with your values, consider incorporating the following questions into your interview process:

Question: “Can you provide an example of how you’ve worked with a team that had different perspectives than your own?”??

Why Ask It? This question assesses the candidate’s ability to collaborate with diverse teams and appreciate different viewpoints.

Question: “Describe a time when you introduced a new idea or approach in your previous role. What was the outcome?”

Why Ask It? This evaluates the candidate’s creativity and willingness to challenge the status quo.

Question: “How do you approach understanding and incorporating diverse viewpoints into your work?”

Why Ask It? Questions like this assess the candidate’s commitment to learning from and leveraging diversity.

Question: “What unique perspectives or experiences do you believe you would bring to our team?”

Why Ask It? This type of question allows candidates to articulate how they can add to the existing culture and contribute to the organization’s growth.

Question: “Can you share an experience where you had to adapt to a significant change at work? How did you handle it?”

Why Ask It? This question evaluates the candidate’s flexibility and resilience in the face of change.

Pros and Cons of Hiring for Culture Add

Organizations can pave the way for embracing culture add by considering both the pros and cons of shifting away from culture fit and toward culture add.?

Pros

• Diverse teams are less likely to fall victim to groupthink and more likely to develop innovative solutions and challenge conventional thinking.
• Emphasizing culture add fosters an environment where differences are valued, leading to higher employee satisfaction and retention.
• Hiring for culture add ensures that the organization benefits from a wider range of skills, experiences, and viewpoints.
• Diverse teams are better equipped to consider multiple angles of a problem and develop comprehensive solutions.

Cons

• Transitioning to a culture add approach can require additional training, restructuring, and resources.
• Teams may initially face challenges in integrating different viewpoints and working styles.
• Employees accustomed to a homogenous culture may resist changes and need interpersonal skills training to embrace new perspectives.
• Integrating diverse perspectives may require more comprehensive onboarding processes to ensure new hires feel supported and included.

Wize Words

Companies that embrace culture add vs. culture fit are more capable of serving a broader global audience and adapting to a rapidly changing environment.

Beyond that, they’ll have a team with diverse perspectives and skills, who are thereby more capable of growing and evolving.