Why Hiring for "Culture Fit" is Killing Your Diversity Hiring Efforts

Like most industries, the recruiting industry has a lot of buzzwords. 

And I’m willing to bet that one of those phrases you’ve heard includes the term “culture fit” used in connection with the topic of diversity hiring.

While it might sound like a good barometer for recruiting diverse individuals it really isn’t.

I recommend that you eliminate “culture fit” from your hiring process if you want your diversity efforts to succeed.

When you use “culture fit” within the bounds of the hiring process it can lead to not hiring a candidate simply because decision makers felt the candidate “wasn’t a culture fit”.

Now I don’t mean you eliminate the culture that your company is evolving into. 

Rather, eliminate that term from your vocabulary if you want to improve your ability to find great people. Instead, evaluate them on the values and the attributes your company is looking for.

Think about it. 

The culture within your company was likely built over time and comprised of people who are very similar to each other.

So, trying to maintain that same culture is killing your diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging efforts.

For example, if you always hired the captain of the football team, from a top ten university for a specific role. Then, every time you interview a candidate, and they lack that particular background you’re risking bias in the process. 

Why?

Because it can lead to “hey, this person is different...they don’t fit the culture”. This can be very subtle, so don’t think it couldn’t happen...it often does.

As a hiring manager, you’re in a great position to identify unconscious bias and to model behavior that will change the way you hire.

Rather than hiring for ‘culture fit’, hire for the attributes and the values that you want in your company.

Diversity is not homogenous

By its very definition, the term diversity means “different”.

And when you’re hiring diverse talent, it brings people to the table who are different, and they are additive to your culture and to your diversity. 

As a hiring manager, embracing that change is difficult, but when you do, you’re transforming your company and your culture to a place that allows you to be more inclusive. Creating such a culture allows you to have people who feel like they belong in your company. And it gives you the opportunity to make sure that you’ve got a level playing field and equity for everyone involved.

But it takes change. It takes risk. And it takes a consistency and a passion for creating a diverse workforce where everyone can feel valued and like they’re part of the organization.

Bias awareness

Earlier I mentioned bias. I know this is something we hear about all the time, but there are some things the hiring manager can do to reduce bias in the hiring process.

First, realize that there is always bias.

One of the things you can do as a hiring manager is to seek out professional help. Get help with assessing and evaluating what your biases are. 

Then, train your teams to mitigate for that bias. They need to be aware of it, so that when you’re in the interview process, and you’re assessing talent you’re aware of your bias and can work through it to get past it.

An effective way to get past any biases is to hire for values rather than “culture fit”. This will ensure that you’re leveling the playing field and being fair across the board.

Evaluate the landscape 

Hiring managers are uniquely positioned to have an impact on diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging within their organization.

What I mean by evaluating the landscape is that as a hiring manager in your SAAS organization you have to ask some questions.

·    What is the company doing?

·    What are the diversity and inclusion efforts you’re working on right now?

·    Why is diversity on your radar?

Follow up with more questions:

·    What’s working?

·    What challenges are we having?

·    Is leadership committed to diversity and inclusion? If so, how? What are they doing, specifically, to help (e.g. creating a budget for your D&I efforts, etc.)

We have silos in all our organizations, typically, no matter the size, big or small. And it’s these silos that can interfere with progress on making changes.

One of the things that you as a SAAS hiring manager can do to push the limits of your diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging efforts is to break down the silos.

For example, a simple silo might be the one between HR and the recruiting team. The communication between HR and recruiting is probably solid. But when you look across the organization; between supply chain, engineering and some of the other parts of the organization you’ll see that communication doesn’t always happen.

And when we’re focused on talent, we want to make sure that best practices are getting shared across the company. As a hiring manager, you’re in a great position to be able to communicate with your peers company wide.

Now if you’re in a small company, that may not be as difficult because you could just walk down to the next person or pick up the phone. 

However, in a large organization, you may need to engage other teams, and you’re probably going to have to find out who the right person is.

Those are things that you want to focus on and just get those silos broken down as a hiring manager because you have influence, and you have peers.

The role of inclusion

The term “inclusion” is often tossed into the mix when people talk about expanding their diversity efforts, but what is it and why is it so important?

A workplace is “inclusive” when diverse individuals feel as if they’re able to:

·    Use their voice

·    Take part in making decisions within a group

·    Increase their standing or power within a group

·    Feel as if they truly belong and that their contribution is valued

According to Deloitte, “A growing body of research indicates that diverse and inclusive teams outperform their peers. Companies with inclusive talent practices in hiring, promotion, development, leadership, and team management generate up to 30 percent higher revenue per employee and greater profitability than their competitors. Without a strong culture of inclusion and flexibility, the team-centric model comprising diverse individuals may not perform well.”

Businesses that want to improve their diversity hiring efforts need to create an inclusive environment. This can be done by:

·    Educating their staff and leadership

·    Making a focused effort on improving communication

·    Encouraging employees to be their full, authentic selves

Try different things

The other thing as a hiring manager that you can do is to take some risks.

If you’re partnering with your recruiter on things that might increase your diversity and inclusion recruiting efforts, talk with the recruiter about that or bring ideas to the table and take a chance.

You want to be able to lead. 

However, sometimes hiring managers don’t know enough about diversity, equity or inclusion so one of the things you can do, if this is you, is to learn the terminology.

While there’s new terminology all the time, once you’ve learned it, get out front and be the champion for your company’s diversity and inclusion efforts and get people on board.

Develop leaders

Another way that hiring managers can help move their talent agenda forward is to develop leaders. This means that sometimes you’re putting someone in a position that they may not actually be prepared for. 

I don’t mean, necessarily, a job position, but what I’m talking about is a project or a task; especially those people who show a passion and an interest in taking on that big of a challenge. 

Interviewer capability

Make sure that, as a SAAS hiring manager and leader in your company, you've got the right people on your interviews, and that they're prepared to do those interviews. 

Bring experienced interviewers into your interview. 

Sometimes this can become a problem because the experienced interviewer may not be a great interviewer.

So, if you are looking to make sure that you've got a team of people who can assess the talent, make sure that:

·    There's training for those interviewers and

·    You're aware of the question that this interviewer has been asking for the last five, six, seven or even 20 years, that may be inappropriate in today's market. 

Interview tips

If you're interviewing candidates the same way as you interviewed them 15 or 20 years ago, just so you can maintain that culture fit, you may want to take a look at that practice. 

Also, make sure that you've got a model where you're able to assess the candidate and understand; did they give you all the answers to the questions you were looking for? 

For example, if you interview a candidate who's from a diverse background, and your interview team is all homogeneous, and came from the same backgrounds, when you ask that candidate a question, the answer may not come back in the cadence, the language, the tonality that you're looking for and you're going to “no-hire” the candidate. 

I've seen this happen in multiple companies over multiple years and it's not necessarily because the interviewer didn't want to hire someone, it was because they didn't have a way of evaluating. 

Interviewer tools 

So, all companies have tools or strategies that guide their interview process.

The one that I frequently talk about is called “SPARKLE”.

The “S” in SPARKLE stands for what's the story.

This acronym is typically designed for a behavioral interviewer. So, for example, you could say, “Hey, tell me about a time when you had to solve a difficult customer issue.”

When you’re using SPARKLE, you're listening for potential candidates to talk about the story surrounding the situation. 

·    The “P” is for problem. 

·    What problem were they trying to solve? 

The “A” is for action.

·    What action did the candidate take to solve the problem? 

·    The “R” stands for “results”.

·    What are the results that they achieved from those actions? 

·    The “K” is for knowledge.

·    What does the candidate know now that they didn't know then, and how would they make adjustments to their efforts?

·    The “L” stands for lessons.

·    What are the lessons learned and how would they apply those lessons in a future effort or a future problem? 

·    And then the “E” is for evidence.

·    What evidence do they have today that says, their actions were successful and had the impact they wanted? 

While SPARKLE is probably a little bit long and/or complicated, it lets you dig in a little bit. 

How to use SPARKLE with an applicant

If a candidate answers a question, but they don't fully answer the question, the tendency of the interviewer is to just kind of write them off and move to the next question. 

My suggestion is that you probe that candidate if they didn't give you enough detail in what their actions were.

Ask them something like, “hey, tell me a little bit more about that; let me understand a little bit more about what you're sharing. What did you learn from this situation? What do you know now that you wish you would have known before? What evidence do you have that everything you just talked about works now or is true?

This is one way that you can continue to probe that candidate on the interview questions. The other thing as a manager that you can do is make sure you are showcasing and have diverse interviewers. 

And when I’m speaking about diversity, I’m saying, broadly speaking, certainly ethnicity and/or gender. But if you don't have the ethnicity or gender diversity in your company, go find people who just think differently and get them on the interview.

Sometimes we only want people who are subject matter experts. But one of the things that will help is just having that diversity of thought on your interview.

It’s going to put you in a position to better evaluate a candidate and to know that they’re someone you want to bring to the table, because they have the values that you want, not that they will or won’t fit into your company’s “culture”.

Role requirements

The other thing you want to do is to look at the role requirements. 

We want to hire the best person with all the skills available for that job. And we develop job descriptions with lots of nice to haves, but not necessarily the primary requirements to do the job. 

So, decide what are the basic qualifications to do the job. 

We just want to get that person because we're trying to make the most out of every hire and get the best person that we possibly can but some of the skills that we're looking for may not be part of the needs for that particular role.

Unconscious bias 

Companies often screen out the very people who would benefit their diversity hiring efforts.

Often businesses are so caught up in finding someone to fill a role that they don’t recognize what is preventing them from improving their diversity hiring efforts.

For example, I work with a company that’s been around for more than 40 years. They’re trying to increase diversity in their executive leadership role.

But what they hadn’t realized is that because all the current executives came from a particular school with a particular GPA, and had specific things that they did in college, whether it's five years ago or 15 years ago, that if candidates didn't have those things, they were screening them out.

They weren’t even giving these diverse candidates a chance to interview or to demonstrate the success that they've had, simply because they weren’t from the same school, had the same experience, etc. 

Screening “in” not screening “out” 

Finally, change how you look at potential hires. Begin “screening in” rather than “screening out” candidates.

“Screening out” a candidate means you’re looking for a way to say no and that it’s up to the candidate to give the company a reason to say yes, which is a subtle difference.

So, when this mindset exists, it has a huge impact on your ability to bring in talent that's different from the talent you already have.

The whole “screening out” concept is closely connected to the “culture fit” question.

So instead of “screening out” candidates, businesses need to be more open minded and look for ways to find the good things a candidate brings to the table. This will allow companies to do a better job of increasing their diversity hiring.