Why ”Culture Fit” is a bad hiring tactic

The TL/DR: Values are more important than culture. Build your organisation around values and you will build a stronger, more capable and more inclusive organisation.

A few weeks ago I went up to Sydney to visit the ARTD Consultants head office. It’s a fairly long journey from Warrnambool, reflecting the sheer size of Australia as a country. Warrnambool is classified as “Inner Regional” Australia, but to get to the nearest major airport is a 3.5 hour train journey, followed by a 45 minute bus ride. From there, a plane to any city is going to take at least another hour in the air. And as I said, I’m in “Inner Regional” Australia. Spare a thought for those in the Outer Regional, Remote and Very Remote regions.

Point is, it’s important to make each trip count, so the week was filled with meetings with my colleagues for coaching and training, and with clients, some of whom I had never actually met face to face before (thanks COVID). It also included speaking on a panel for the Diversity Council of Australia, on the topic of neurodiversity and employment and how we can support neurodivergent employees at all stages of their careers. Normally I would say I am diverse as a glass of milk, but in this case I was at least speaking on a topic in which I had some expertise. I was also joined by a group of panellists from a range of industries who each brought unique perspectives and experiences to the topic.

While I had been given the panel questions in advance, the audience questions always present some curveballs, and in this case I got caught by a question from someone who had lived experience of neurodivergence. They had asked for our opinions on the idea of “culture fit” as they had been repeatedly turned down for employment on the basis of not being a good fit for the culture. The questioner saw it as a soft excuse for rejecting people they didn’t like or neurodivergent people in particular because of the different way that they think.

Knowing that the audience included a lot of HR people, I let my feelings be known:

I HATE CULTURE FIT.

Sorry for yelling, but it’s the truth. And I let it be known, that if you hire for culture fit, you’re going to create a culture monolith. And that’s a dangerous prospect. Culture is not something fixed and unchanging, but something that evolves over time. And it evolves through having new perspectives that challenge ideas, test dogmas and bring innovation. A monolith culture that doesn’t evolve will miss out on this. I finished with the warning that any firm who hires based on culture fit won’t be hiring for long, because they will be outcompeted by those firms that evolve their culture to meet a changing world.

While it was a nice rant, I realised later that I had broken a rule that we try to follow at ARTD, which is that it’s alright to point out issues, but it’s even better if we bring solutions. I’d failed to provide an alternative to hiring for culture fit that can guide firms to be more inclusive. I thought about it for a bit, and went back to the office. When I got to the kitchen to make a coffee, I realised the answer was literally in front of me.

At ARTD we put our values front and centre in our work. They reflect our vision (“A more thoughtful world”), and guide our decision making. I realised that unlike culture, values represent a much better way to look at candidates, as well as to coach and mentor staff. Rather than hiring for culture fit, we need to be hiring for values fit. Here’s why.

Values can be articulated

Try and describe the culture of your organisation. Can you articulate it in 50 words or less? Could you give a reasonable explanation of why a potential candidate “didn’t fit” into the culture of the organisation? The reason “culture fit” is so unlikeable as a reason for not hiring a person is that it is vague and can cover up so many sins of discrimination.

Values, on the other hand, can be easily articulated. You can put them on the kitchen wall, write them on your hand, put them on a website . They’re clear and consistent.

Values are (relatively) fixed

As I said above, culture changes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a social group, a company or an entire society, things change. How we do things today will not be how we do things in the future, or how we did things in the past. Hiring for “culture” has historically marginalised people; you just have to remember that 100 years ago most women in workplaces were relegated to secretarial duties and forced out when they got married. Women who wanted to join the trades or take a leadership role were given the same “culture fit” excuse - it was a man’s culture, and men of that era didn’t want that to change.

Contrast this with values. What we value tends to be consistent across time and people. If they evolve at all, they evolve slowly. A good set of values tends to reflect things that are constant for people - to use ARTD as an example, “critical thinking” tends to stay constant over time for people. It’s also something deeply enmeshed with a person’s way of thinking. When I have asked the question “when did you become a critical/curious/creative thinker?” People will usually reply that they’ve always been like that.

That’s not to say that the set of values cannot change, in fact it’s good practice to reflect on your values to ask whether they are the right set. Sometimes, what we thought was a value turns out not to be, and sometimes you realise that there’s a value missing. The latter happened to us - when we first put our values down on paper, there were only five of them. But we realised that something was missing, something that reflected the way we engaged and empathised with those we worked with. It prompted us to add “compassion” to the list - as a company we discussed it and agreed that that was a shared value, one that reflected how we worked.

Values can be understood in the recruitment and performance management process

One of the things that really riles me about “culture fit” is that it can’t be easily measured. It eludes qualification in qualitative terms, let alone as a quantitative KPI. Which means that you can’t be transparent about your rationale (again, this makes it a favourite for those who want to be vague).

Values are a bit easier to measure. I’ll be the first to admit that quantifying curiosity or compassion as a neat KPI would be a bit awkward (though possible), but you can evaluate someone’s alignment with a value much more easily. That’s because behaviour reflects values. You can ask someone about a time where they’ve displayed compassion, honesty or integrity and their answer will reveal a lot about what that value means to them.

If you want to get technical about it, you can even create a rubric (oh great, Gerard’s banging on about rubrics again). Seriously though, a rubric approach allows you to transparently communicate the qualities required to meet a threshold of performance against a set of criteria - the rubric process forces you to reflect on what constitutes behaviour that reflects (or rejects) a value, and how that is consistent with your organisation’s values. It’s accountable.?

People can share the same values, but have different ways of thinking, feeling and knowing

Remember I said that hiring for culture fit creates a monolith? People who share culture fit are likely to think the same way, and behave the same way. It’s a sure fire recipe for groupthink, and that’s dangerous. Values work differently. Two people can have common values but very different ways of articulating them, sometimes to the point of opposition. It happens all the time in my workplace, especially with the more theoretically-minded staff (I’m very much the hands-in-the-muck type of person). We are in no doubt that we share the quality of being critical thinkers, but we diverge in what we think about and what conclusions that leads us to.?

When we focus on shared values, we put front and centre what is common to all of us. That means when the discussion gets heated, we can focus on the message and not the messenger, and leave the conversation with a sustained respect for the other person. This also extends to feedback. A shared understanding of values provides a framework through which feedback can be delivered. By contrast, culture (and the desire to protect it as a monolith) can stifle healthy criticism and conflict, and lead to bigger problems in the long term.

This is all especially important in engaging people from different groups and lived experiences. Two people can come from vastly different cultures but hold very similar values. Ironically, when the focus is on culture alone this can be a breeding ground for conflict. It’s not hard to find examples from world history where differences in culture have been used to drive a wedge between peoples, despite those peoples having a common set of core values. When we hire for values we look beyond the differences and find the commonalities.

Summing up with a caveat

Of course, while values are far easier to define than culture, it’s still possible to get it wrong. Vague values can be so broad as to encompass anyone, while values that are too narrowly defined restrict thinking and can stifle innovation. But I argue that values are still far easier to define than culture.

To test whether values are in that sweet spot, in consulting work I ask people to explain to me what they think that value means - what are some examples you’ve seen, how would you demonstrate that value in your life? If there’s little to no agreement then there’s a good chance that it’s too broad, if the same examples keep showing up in answers then it might be too narrow.?

What is important and helpful is to define those values and articulate that shared understanding of meaning across your organisation. Have the discussions with your teams and your leadership about what the values mean, and coalesce on a common set of meanings that clarify understanding. Moreover, be prepared to reflect on those understandings with your organisation and if necessary, refine that set of values. A process of reflection allows people to build on a common understanding, and through that build a stronger, more inclusive organisation.