Go from “Culture-Fit” to “Culture-Add” and WIN!

By Coach Gabriela Mueller Mendoza

One of the most problematic practices today in companies is to hire for “Culture fit”?

Concepts like culture, values, and morals are all subjective. Therefore, it’s impossible to create assessments based on these concepts that are equitable for candidates. This becomes especially problematic if hiring teams develop criteria for culture fit that is based on personality traits and individual preferences and biases.

When HR/hiring managers look for “culture-fit” talent they miss out on innovation, potential, creativity, bottom-line results, and risk being irrelevant within the next few years. Stay with me because we’ll explore what “Culture-fit” is and why we need to upgrade our views in 2022 about diverse talent.

The #1 benefit of workplace diversity is improved employee engagement and satisfaction, followed by better market share and representation, beating the competition and innovation. When diversity is put together with real inclusion the magic happens. Hiring diverse talent is not easy. Let’s review a make-it or break-it factor in corporations.

Let’s define “Culture fit.” Searching for candidates who are “like me” and calling them a good cultural fit creates a false narrative that breeds misalignment and homogeneity, both of which are bad for business. While HR/hiring managers might not agree that they hire “people like themselves” statistics show otherwise. ?

As a coach (now almost two decades of corporate experience), I use leadership and personality assessment all the time to start coaching my clients. One of them is DISC Insights (four typologies Driver, inspiring, stable, or compliant). Numbers show that when given the chance, 7 in 10 managers have hired people with whom they share many commonalities, for example, their top 2 typologies in this DISC assessment.?They end up with teams that look alike, think alike, lack the same skills, and have similar abilities.?When we “x-ray” their team in coaching sessions, managers usually have an “a-ha moment”. We show data and patterns. It’s clear, a culture-fit approach is outdated, and bias is running those hiring practices.

Companies that exclude diverse viewpoints will probably struggle in innovating, competing, and figuring out how to execute their diversity and inclusion goals.?Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will separate the good from the great in the very near future - as soon as 2025, because of an expected massive generational shift.

?On the other hand, a “Culture Add” approach shifts the framework away from hiring more of the same types of people based on subjective evaluations to objectively and proactively looking for people with different thinking styles and experiences that can round out a team and make it more effective.

A “Culture add” view is based on identifying what a team lacks, and then being visionary and courageous to add new members who can bring these things to the table. This approach requires evaluating each candidate relative to their existing team and determining what new factor the candidate brings.

“Would you enjoy going for a beer with this person?”

The “last mile” of the hiring process relies on hiring managers and the team to make sound final decisions about a candidate. Here’s where I see the most obvious and wrong question to ask at this point: “Would I want to have a beer with this person?”. This is the wrong question to ask. The answer to that question doesn’t reflect a candidate’s ability to do the job at all. The well-known “like-me” bias ends up perpetuating homogeneity and groupthink. Studies show that often interviewers sometimes look for "potential friends/colleagues" rather than qualified candidates. Would I want to have a beer with this person?”?

"The bottom line is: Hiring For Culture Fit Reinforces Unconscious Bias" 
                              Coach Gabriela Mueller        

?Three things that great hiring managers do to hire “Culture-add” talent:

?1. They get clear with your team about assessment criteria. They use systems or scorecards to ensure interviewers are assessing candidates on the same criteria — not on personality that has little to do with the job.?

2.?They keep an open mind when candidates don't fit the mold. A manager/recruiter needs to ask him/herself whether this might be an asset. The missing piece in the puzzle, rather than a possible liability because the candidate is different, dresses, thinks, or comes from different backgrounds, life paths, or origins.?

3. When the “culture-fit” language shows up in the process, good managers will dig deeper, and will ask powerful questions, and require interviewers to provide specific details and examples. They will also Interrogate their reasoning before making any final decisions. S/he will encourage their team to hold each other accountable.

Culture add is not about quotas.

It’s key to recognize that culture add is not about checking the diversity box. Hiring people of different ethnicities, minorities, different demographics may help increase diversity, but it will not add to your culture if they all think the same way.?

An example of that is a recent meeting I had with a large insurance company in Central Europe. While their numbers of all genders were almost equally represented in the room, they all came with almost the exact academic background, lived in the same Zip-codes and ethnicity. The proud manager told me “We are so happy were are now such a diverse team”.?He as many of us had blind spots we need to address.

?If you want to bring diversity in the room, do not ignore factors like race, ethnicity, gender, and even walks of life, viewpoints that make up your current culture, like world experiences, or beliefs about technology and the role of business, innovative minds.?

Culture add is as much about how a candidate looks at the world as to how the world looks at them.

?Coach Gabriela Mueller Mendoza

Business Strategist /Advisor, Coach and D I specialist- Edu-trainer. Diversity and Inclusion Strategy Advisor?–?Online Trainer & Executive Communications Coach Author - Blogger – Podcaster?

www.gabrielamueller.com - [email protected]

Gabriela Mueller GmbH - Switzerland

Instagram @coachgabrielamueller TikTok @gabriela.mueller

Author of “How to be a Smart Woman in STEM Science Tech Engineering Mathematics on AMAZON / Paperback & kindle. Podcast The Smart Woman Podcast in Spotify?

Gabriela helps corporate clients unlock Human Potential & Inclusive Courageous Leadership every day.

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