How to Hire for Culture Fit and Diversity

The debate about whether hiring for culture fit undermines an organization’s diversity is ongoing, with valid points on both sides. However, instead of taking an either/or approach, companies can successfully integrate both culture fit and increased diversity into their hiring practices. All it takes is a thoughtful and honest assessment of current processes – and a commitment to making changes if needed.

First, what do you mean by culture fit?

The first step is defining what culture fit means – and what it doesn’t. Evaluating job candidates for culture fit involves assessing how well their values align with the organization’s values, as well as the team or department they’ll be joining. Research shows that when values align between employers and employees, people stay longer and perform better.

When people say that hiring for culture fit can be detrimental to diversity, the assumption is that assessing value alignment leads to “cloning” your workforce by only hiring people like you. Based on my experience as a business leader and now as a coach, this won’t happen as long as executives, hiring managers, and the overall organization are on the same page about the company’s culture.

The reality is that corporate culture means different things to people at different levels of an organization. A recent consulting engagement reinforced this for me. While executive teams view culture from the enterprise level, managers and individual contributors experience the company’s culture through the lens of the teams they’re part of. Think about your experiences. Team leaders and department managers play a powerful role in setting the tone, culture, and values for employees on a day-to-day basis.

Too often, corporate culture gets boiled down into well-intended aspirational statements. It’s at the team level where the translation into company culture happens, for better or worse. When a company doesn’t have a clear perspective of how the organization is living its culture, it can default to conflating cultural fit with a candidate’s personal characteristics.

How can you determine culture fit?

When assessing culture fit, focus on how well a candidate’s values line up with your organization’s values. And be vigilant that the assessment doesn’t extend to how well their personal characteristics, including gender, ethnicity, age, or sexual orientation, align with your workforce.

Studies have shown that making the deeper value fit assessment results in higher retention, especially among demographically different employees, who are often a risk for lower retention. By tightening the focus of culture fit to defined value alignment, you can actually enhance efforts to increase the diversity of your workforce.

Related: The Business Case for Diverse Bench Strength

So, how do you do it? Don’t wing it. First, create a cross-functional process within your organization to define the employee attributes that align with both your team’s culture and the company’s. At the same time, identify the attributes and values that are not a good fit. Spend time getting feedback and internal agreement. Without buy-in from leaders and employees of all levels, you’re likely to find yourself spinning your wheels, or worse, abandoning the effort a few months down the road.

Once you have internal agreement, focus on crafting culture-fit questions to be included in all candidate interviews. Thoughtful, standard questions are key to establishing a consistent assessment and moving away from subjective judgments based only on personality or background. Develop culture-related questions at both the team and corporate levels. This way, you can gain an understanding of the candidate’s immediate fit as well as the corporate culture fit for long-term mobility and leadership potential.

Finally, integrate the same attributes and competencies into your talent management planning process, so that culture-fit is also considered on an ongoing basis as you evaluate employees for development and build your leadership bench.

In my practice, I help leaders incorporate strategic, objective tools into their current processes to optimize hiring decisions, neutralize unconscious bias, and accelerate the impact of diversity on their businesses. Contact me to explore the opportunities for you, your team, and your organization.