Don't Hire for Culture Fit - Ruchika Tulshyan, SHRM Executive Network

This resource first appeared in issue #117 on 09 Apr 2022 and has tags Hiring: Other, Hiring: Interviewing and Evaluating

Don’t Hire for Culture Fit - Ruchika Tulshyan, SHRM Executive Network

I agree with everything in this article; “Culture Fit” too often means “like us”. So when people don’t give any better reason than “culture fit” for not wanting to hire a candidate, it ends up being wildly exclusionary. It’s also counterproductive! When you’re hiring, you want to grow the team not just in numbers but in capability, and hiring more of the same doesn’t get you there. As Tulshyan says, culture add is a good and useful thing.

There are also a number of behaviours and skills particular to a team which are absolutely worth making explicit and turning into hiring criteria, and those often get put under “cultural fit”. Those are important, and worth keeping but maybe we need a more specific term. For instance, in a research computing team, it’s common (not universal, but common) that to succeed, a new hire will need to be much more comfortable with uncertainty and under-specified projects than would be common at the same level of seniority elsewhere. Any other behavioural or communication skills and behaviours that can be called out with enough specificity to be unambiguously evaluated are worth considering.

As with all potential requirements, you should filter by“would a person really not succeed here if they didn’t have this?” If it’s not something that would stand in the way of their or the team’s success, it oughtn’t be a criteria.