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Hire for Culture Fit
What it means and how to do it right
alexandermannsolutions.com

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What will we
explore?
“I think she’ll fit well into our company.”
“His experience was stellar, but he just wouldn’t be a good fit.”
These phrases are frequently used to describe candidates and whether they
will – or won’t – “fit” into an organization’s culture. But what does culture fit
really mean? Is there a better way to determine how well a candidate will fit
than simply having a good feeling about whether they’ll mesh well? And, how
do goals of hiring for culture fit complement—or conflict— with other goals
such as diversity or hiring for skills?
This article will explore these questions and provide best practices.
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Organizational
Culture 101
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What is it?
Before moving on to how to measure culture and hire for it, it’s important to get on the
same page about what it truly is.
Academics
To answer this question academically: “Organizational culture reflects the values,
beliefs, and norms that characterize an organization as a whole.” It can include
these overlapping concepts:
Artifacts, which are visible expressions of an organization. These could include, for example, the
company logo, classic company stories, an open concept office layout, and how the CEO
communicates.
Values, which are often verbal or written expressions of what is important at a company. For
example, a commonly stated company value is to put “customers first.” While the terms “values”
and “culture” are sometimes used interchangeably, values are really just one part of
organizational culture.
Assumptions or beliefs that guide behavior. These are deep-seated and largely unspoken. They
are what happen when values become so engrained that they are taken for granted. For
example, in a company with a strong culture of teamwork, employees will likely develop the
assumption that they will help their teammates in a pinch even if it falls outside of their job
description or they are not directly recognized for their efforts.
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To answer the question “what is organizational culture?” practically:
it’s “the way things get done around here.” A few examples:
Are employees expected to work late and on weekends, or do they shut down their phones the
moment 5 pm arrives?
Do they dress in suits every day, in jeans and a hoodie, or is it a hybrid where maybe they only
dress up when they join a video conference?
Are they expected to perform as individual “stars” or work collaboratively at all times?
Do they start each internal meeting diving straight into a formal and documented agenda, or do
they ask about each other’s weekend and discuss the weather?
Will they do whatever clients’ whims dictate at any time, or do they prioritize originally-planned
scope and budgets?
Practicality
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If someone says, “we have a strong company culture,” what does that
really mean?
Most likely, it means that the majority of people who work for the company
understand the culture, talk about it in a similar way, and are personally aligned to
it. Everyone is moving in the same direction in the same way, and they know it.
But what does this mean for an organization with multiple business units or
divisions, or one that is geographically dispersed? For example, a manufacturing
company will likely have a sales department and internal support departments like
IT or HR. And, these could be located in various places around the world.
According to Edward Schein, one of the world’s leading researchers in the area of
organizational culture, there are several categories of culture: Macrocultures;
organizational cultures; subcultures (groups within organizations either due to the
level or function of the individual); and microcultures (such as the behavioral
expectations within a two-person working team).
As one might expect, alignment amongst all of these components is critical. Where
there is misalignment, it will be more difficult to conduct business because so
much energy is spent getting over the shock of misaligned cultural expectations.
Categories of Culture
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There are multiple methods to assess an organization’s current culture, such as
focus groups, interviews with leaders, culture surveys, or comparisons of said
culture to those of other companies.
One immediate tangible outcome of this type of measurement is to ensure that all
employees, particularly top leaders, are aligned on the organization’s culture and
the specific words to describe it.
As a result, the organization has the ability to create a more relevant and authentic
mission or values statement, an updated focus on the desired cultural attributes
and the behaviors that operationalize them in goal-setting and performance
reviews, along with more focused hiring practices.
Measuring Culture
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Culture Fit
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Culture Fitting Your Strategy
Organizational culture can sometimes be slow to change, but it should
be consistent with the organization’s current and future strategy. For
example, if an organization wants to focus more on driving operational
efficiency in the future, it should have a different culture than one that
focuses on research or innovation and is less risk-averse.
Employees will need to adapt their behavior to align with the new
company focus, and recruiters will need to amend their talent search to
accommodate a candidate profile that matches the culture.
Determining what an organization’s culture should be requires a firm
grasp of how the organization operates and where it is headed to stay
competitive in the market. It also requires an understanding of how
adaptive the culture will need to be, because strategic culture change
should be planned.
People Fitting Your Culture
Having an aligned culture does not mean that everyone should
be a clone. There is an important difference between a strong
culture where employees understand their role within their teams
and how they are expected to perform, as well as homogeneity of
personality or demographics.
Indeed, this is why measuring culture and candidates’
cultural fit objectively is so important; otherwise, a
hiring manager may mistake a candidate’s similarity to
him or herself as “culture fit.”
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Hiring for Culture Fit
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Pros of Hiring For Culture Fit
A candidate fits your organization’s culture well if their motivators, values, and beliefs
are aligned with the organization’s. An individual may be highly skilled in their field of
expertise, but if they do not fit the culture, it is unlikely that they will succeed long-term.
For example, imagine that collaboration is required of all employees at an organization,
and employees know that this will be required to fulfil the organization’s strategy
moving forward. Ensuring candidates understand this, are motivated by it, and have
experience thriving in collaborative environments will be key.
Research shows us that employees who fit the culture of their organization and various
groups in which they belong will have higher satisfaction, stronger performance, and
will stay with the organization longer. Some leaders even prioritize culture fit over a
candidate’s skills; people can be taught to do the work, but they can’t be taught to have
a similar set of motivations, values, and underlying traits that will make them succeed in
the company.
Recent studies have also found that ignoring culture fit is a big mistake when recruiting
millennials. Millennials care a great deal about their work environment and are likely to
quickly re-evaluate their employment options if they feel unsatisfied.
Understanding the organization’s culture, communicating it to current and potential
employees, and hiring those who complement it, is always important—particularly
when hiring millennials or future generations.
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Diversity Initiatives and Culture Fit
Recall that hiring for culture fit does not mean hiring for people who are similar to others in
the organization in terms of demographics or other attributes. A candidate who is a culture
fit may or may not be someone who you personally “like.”
It is necessary to dig beneath the surface to understand true culture fit. A successful, well-
fitting candidate should care about similar underlying principles and genuinely want the
organization to succeed. People from a variety of demographics, backgrounds, and work
styles can still effectively align to a strong culture.
The respect for and celebration of diversity can be one important element of an
organization’s culture. Flexible holidays, employee working groups, diverse leadership, and
company communications stressing the importance of diversity and inclusion are all
cultural indicators. If these types of attributes are important to an organization, they
should be communicated to candidates during the selection process. Diverse and inclusive
environments, for example, can encourage employees to have an active voice in shaping
the culture in a way that is best aligned with the company’s strategic goals.
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Measuring Candidate
Culture Fit
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As previously mentioned, recruiters and hiring managers can sometimes have a
misguided view of what culture fit really is and therefore whether a candidate fits
the culture.
Some dramatic examples of misguided culture fit hiring have revealed that
candidates were asked to consume alcohol during interviews, or the new hires’
peers vote on whether they are a fit after a probationary period.
These methods were intended to measure whether or not the candidate would fit
in with the interests of their potential future colleagues.
However, “fitting in” does not necessarily mean the individual is someone that
every employee would want to socialize with outside of work hours, and not all
employees have a clear understanding of whether a candidate will be able to
perform in a way that is aligned to meet goals.
It is critical to properly measure candidates’ potential fit with your organization in
an objective and sound manner.
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Branding
Seeing the logo of a brand can (and should) evoke certain thoughts regarding what
the company stands for. Whether the organization is known for a specific product,
outstanding service, global success, or efficiency, consumers and employees alike
can describe what is important to that organization just by seeing its logo or
hearing its name.
A strong and well-communicated brand, therefore, should provide a candidate with
a realistic preview of the company’s culture. For example, someone who thrives on
innovation may be tempted to apply to Apple, whereas someone who believes in
the importance of security and stability may be attracted to General Electric.
Companies that have a weaker brand presence than an organization
like Apple or General Electric will have to work a bit harder to communicate their
brand to candidates. From the first few words of a job advertisement,
to completing an interview, to negotiating an offer, the candidate
witnesses first-hand the company’s brand and culture.
The more accurate and clearly communicated an
organization’s culture is throughout the selection
process, the better your candidates will be at
appropriately self-selecting in or out of the
process based on how aligned they feel.
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Interviews
Interviews remain the most frequently utilized ways to measure candidates’ fit within an
organization’s culture. Candidates must display both the skills and experience required for
performance and their potential culture fit during the interview, and often they may be
displaying both at once.
Behavioral interviews provide valuable insights into how candidates have approached
similar work situations in the past, and how they are likely to do so in the future. In addition,
they can reveal the candidate’s work style, values, and motivators. All can potentially
impact the candidate’s culture fit.
For example, a hiring manager could ask a candidate a question about their leadership
style. If that candidate is accustomed to making independent, hierarchical decisions, they
may not be the best fit for a culture where employees are expected to seek a lot of input.
Once again, hiring for culture fit does not mean hiring people you like, or who are similar to
you or others within the organization, it means hiring people who will succeed within the
organization. New hires who are a good cultural fit will be motivated by the environment
and more likely to thrive. Therefore, it can be useful to interview candidates about what
types of culture works best for them.
Additionally, asking the candidate about work style, preferences for getting feedback,
motivators, and preferred working environment can also help determine if the candidate is
a good culture fit.
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Tests
There are two major points to keep in mind when using tests to
measure culture fit:
1. A test should be just one of many candidate measures to take into account. It
should provide insights that would otherwise be difficult to accurately capture
through interviews.
2. It is critical to know exactly what you’re looking for. For example, if you’re testing
personality profiles, is it really necessary to have homogeneity of characteristics?
Is it even desired?
Considering these points, it is recommended to utilize profiling or work-style tests to
help shape specific interview questions and provide a complete candidate picture. In
contrast, it is not recommended to use a psychometric test as an isolated measure of a
candidate’s culture fit or to determine overall if they will be successful within your
organization.
An assessment to further pinpoint a candidate’s fit with
the organizational culture can also be utilized. A
personality assessment or a work style assessment can
help recruiters and hiring managers better understand,
for example, whether candidates prefer more creative or
more prescribed work tasks, whether they work better
independently or collaboratively, or whether they are
motivated by attributes that are similar to the
organization’s values such as putting customers first, or
the opportunity to take calculated risks.
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Case Studies
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Netflix
The world was surprised when an unadorned set of 127 slides (no music, no animation)
explaining how Netflix shaped its culture and motivated performance went viral. It has been
viewed more than 5 million times on the web and Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook,
called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. Its
common sense approach articulated the very heart of the Netflix culture and recruitment
process, including:
 Hiring only “stunning colleagues” and paying top market rates. Managers hire, develop and
downsize smartly so they have A players in every position.
 Employees talking openly about issues with their boss, their colleagues, and their
subordinates.
 Focusing on outputs not effort – reward great results, even if they required minimal effort.
 Lots of freedom and minimal administration (e.g. there is no vacation policy at Netflix –
employees can take as much leave as they like as long as they deliver exceptional results.)
To recruit the right people, Netflix prides itself on establishing much closer, consultative
relationships between researchers, recruiters and hiring managers, forming a “Culture of
Recruitment”. Its talent acquisition strategy depends on the Manager the Recruiter is
working with, and Recruiters spend a considerable amount of time with Hiring Managers to
develop a true sense of the team’s dynamic, needs, and impact. Netflix strives to be creative
about where they search for talent.
They often need people with niche, rarefied technical skills such as big data, so they look
beyond searching CVs and keyword matching, in order to probe “beneath the surface” in
interviews.
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National Health Service
In 2015 , NHS used “We Love Work” screening assessments over an 18-month period to
attract and retain more millennial talent at the organization. Using data from existing NHS
employees, the tool measured the personal values and motivations of millennial
candidates and matched them to core values and culture of the NHS team they were
joining.
“We Love Work” increased retention amongst the millennial hires on the program by an
average of 22%. This has a significant impact on the NHS’s time to hire, on-boarding
processes, and cost of turnover, which can range from $1,600 to over $7,000 per hire. At
least 30% of the candidates hired went on to work in other areas of the NHS or were
promoted inside the organisation.
Zappos
Zappos, an online shoe and clothing retailer, has a completely separate part of the
interview process aimed entirely at assessing cultural fit. It’s slightly unusual practices have
sometimes raised eyebrows:
 Interacting with candidates in a range of social settings (the “social test”)
 Observing the candidate’s behavior getting picked up from the airport (the “nice guy test”)
 Asking new hires to spend their first four weeks manning phones in their call center (the
“service test”)
 Offering all new hires $3,000 to leave one week into their role – though only 2 – 3% accepted
(the “ultimate test”)
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How
Alexander Mann Solutions
Can Help
Recruiting for cultural fit is vital if you want to
attract, engage, and retain top talent.
Alexander Mann Solutions is uniquely poised to help you understand your current
culture and hire candidates that provide the optimal fit and we welcome the
opportunity to talk to you.
As a vendor-neutral consulting practice, we have the ability to incorporate the best and
latest tools and technologies, coupled with true partnership consulting.
We will help you implement your culture-driven strategy to hire and retain the best-fit
people into your organization. Let’s get started!
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Want even more content on hiring for culture fit?
Check-out this video, the 20th episode of The Recruiting Reel, where Mark Jones,
a Senior Vice President in the Americas at Alexander Mann Solutions, chats about
hiring for cultural fit.
Click here for the transcript.
Measuring Culture
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For more information, visit alexandermannsolutions.com.
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Sharon Boslet
Head of Selection, Americas
M / (+1) 224-908-9614
E / sharon.boslet@alexmann.com
alexandermannsolutions.com
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