Hiring for Culture Add vs Culture Fit

'Cultural Fit' is a new hiring buzzword in multiple industries. The idea is that you hire a group of people who have similar interests and qualities and they will work better together. Whether a candidate is a 'fit' is usually determined by a small number of key people in the interview process: a recruiter, a founder, or a senior executive for example. The idea of 'fit' and its negative impact on diversity has been discussed at length. Let's explore why this is a problem and how to hire a team avoiding that problem while maintaining an engaging culture.

The attributes that make up cultural fit are typically defined by a small group of senior employees, whereas cultural addition practices allows hiring managers to create diverse teams based on who adds value to their teams for their current or future business problems. Up-front specification of cultural fit is like starting an unknown puzzle with a defined boundary. You have predefined who fits and who does not without knowing the future of your business. People who are perceived to not fit in that boundary, or challenge the boundary, are considered outsiders or not team players. This leads to mistrust and potentially toxic work conditions. By approaching candidates with a cultural add attitude, you are starting the puzzle from the middle. People can connect to multiple pieces and expand outward as your business changes and grows. You can even create multiple disconnected clusters and hire experienced leaders to connect them together as necessary.

Culture Fit: A few people define the boundary of who will be allowed to fit and every employee must fit within that boundary leading to group think, lack of diversity and efficiency.

Cultural Add: Employees are selected based on what they can add to the organization for any number of their experiences and connect to multiple pieces as the business needs expand.

Why does Cultural Fit hiring cause problems?

• Focus on Passion: Passion is a good thing. You want people to be passionate about their role, and your company. However, prioritizing passion over experience is a big issue for long term success. A group of inexperienced employees with a lot of ambition will lead to inefficiencies quickly within a team. If few team members have the experience to recognize gaps in process, or mistakes in policy, the team could end up working ambitiously doing the wrong things. Passion is a complement to, not a replacement for, experience.
• The Beer Test: You are being hired to produce results, not to socialize. Social elements of work are key, but there is a difference between asking about someone’s weekend in the common space and socializing outside of hours. Experienced employees (often older) have different priorities than socializing. Prioritizing someone’s interest in socializing creates bias against applicants with differing lifestyles than your cultural fit allows.
• Homogeneity: By building your puzzle's border before you even know the specific challenges with which you will be faced, you are limiting your business' potential. New ideas are shunned or not even available, because your culture's homogeneity stifles ideas that challenge the border you’ve created.

Cultural Addition solves these issues by focusing on what a person can add to a team. You need passionate people to be your brand advocates and you want to have friends at work, but you also need experience to guide you in the right direction, you need technical capabilities, business acumen, relationship management or perhaps cultural awareness for expanding businesses. These are all experiences that don't necessarily overlap or come within one hire. By hiring a mixture of those experiences, everyone learns more. The hire that has strong business acumen can teach that to the technical person, while simultaneously growing his or her technical understanding of your solution. Every person feels invested in, as they are constantly learning and gaining new perspectives. Plan to hire a bunch of differently shaped puzzle pieces which all fit together to build your bigger picture, not a set of similarly shaped pieces that connect in the same way within the same boundary.

In practice, there are 5 steps to follow to achieve this with a culture addition attitude:

1. Your first hire on any team needs to be the rock star. They need to have experience in their position and set the bar for all future hires. This person may be hired into a more junior role initially, but by laying out the plan for the team the person will see the growth potential and his or her ability to shape the direction of the team. This person may be your team lead in the future or maybe just a senior go-to person on the team, but either way, they need to be the yardstick that everyone measures themselves against and strives to mimic.
2. The next hire needs to have a slightly different experience. If your rock star is super customer or relationship focused, then your next hire should be less so, and more focused on another aspect of the role. They need to complement or add to each other.
3. Repeat step 2 as you build your team. They may all have the same title, but they should bring something new to the table. This could be in the form of experience, passion, leadership qualities, innovators, process specialists, tool specialists etc. each member needs to learn from the others and teach the others at the same time.
4. Engage with your team at an individual level. Every person has different needs, desires and concerns. Build programs for each person so that they feel the business investing in them and their success.
5. Build trust. The team must be able to identify gaps, make mistakes and speak honestly about the practices, the policies, and the outcomes at your company. By encouraging feedback and actioning every piece of it, no matter how insignificant you may feel the feedback is to you, you will grow trust and build a deeper sense of everyone working for the ultimate success of the organization.

Diverse experiences are the most important tool you have to build a successful team. When companies talk about diversity, it is usually in the form of gender or ethnic diversity, which really are types of experience diversity. Women, men, and different ethnicities inherently have different experiences from which we all can learn and grow. They add to the culture of a company and make the business more inclusive, more diverse and more successful. So don’t worry if you don't want to have a beer with everyone on your team, worry about if that person contributes to your team's success in a unique way. Build your puzzle from the center and change where the pieces go as your business changes without limiting it to an arbitrary boundary.