Assessing cultural fit: 5 tips for hiring success
Discover essential tips to assess cultural fit and secure the talent your organisation needs for sustained success.
Senior leaders and people professionals have been taking organisational culture more seriously in recent years, as more evidence ties culture to long-term success. After all, a happy, harmonious and engaged workforce will always deliver better results than one that’s disconnected, disjointed, and discontent.
While many employers understand the importance of creating the right culture within their organisation, often overlooked is the need to assess cultural fit when interviewing candidates.
In this article, we’re going to look at some of the key strategies for assessing a candidate’s cultural fit within your hiring strategy.
What is culture fit?
An organisation’s culture is essentially the collective values, expectations, ways of working, communication styles, and attitudes that influence actions and decisions. The importance of culture should certainly not be underestimated, especially in an age where employees are on the lookout for employers that align with their views on things like work-life balance when searching for new jobs.
The famed Austrian-American consultant and educator Peter Drucker, whose writings were influential in the development of modern management theory, coined the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This wasn’t to diminish the importance of strategy, but to show how vital culture is when it comes to successfully operating as a company.
Cultural fit refers to how an employee or candidate for a role fits into the culture, whether they are compatible with the organisation’s values, aims, and ways of working. This can have a profound impact on the employees’ time at the organisation.
Why is cultural fit so important?
Cultural fit can be central to the success of an organisation for a number of reasons. Let’s take a quick look at some of the most significant:
- Team dynamics: If you have a team of people who think and act in ways that are opposed to each other, that team is going to function poorly. There will be communication breakdowns, disagreements over what to do and how to do it, and the possibility for resentment to grow. If, however, employees share the same values, or are at least on board with the shared values promoted by an organisation, they can create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This means better communication, healthier relationships between team members, and less chance of conflict, resulting in better problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate change and uncertainty.
- Productivity: Given how cultural fit improves team dynamics, there is also a strong link between cultural fit and employee productivity. That’s because a good team culture creates engaged employees who are more likely to be productive. To highlight just how crucial this could be to an organisation’s bottom line, one recent study found that organisations that focus on creating a culture of engagement within their workforce can increase profitability by more than a fifth. This is because workers who are aligned with the company’s values and ways of working can reduce any risk of cognitive dissonance between their personal values and the work they’re being asked to carry out.
- Employee retention: Not only does cultural fit help to create better dynamics within teams and more productive workers, but it also leads to employee retention. Our research shows that employers are still facing challenges when it comes to hiring people for open positions, with the average role taking nearly five weeks to fill. Retention of top staff is therefore more of a priority than ever, and one of the best ways to ensure this is by making sure they are the right cultural fit.
5 strategies to assess cultural fit
Given the impact strong organisational culture can have on the strategic outcomes of an organisation, incorporating ways to assess cultural fit when interviewing candidates should be a top consideration for any hiring strategy. It’s not just about the interview stage, however, as there are several other factors to consider when looking to onboard employees who are a good fit for your organisation’s culture.
Here are five strategies you can look to leverage to successfully assess a candidate’s cultural fit before making a hiring decision.
Define your organisational culture
It’s no good trying to assess a candidate’s cultural fit if you don’t have a clear idea of your organisation’s culture. It’s likely your organisation has at least a broad idea of the culture it’s looking to build or continue with, but just as the business landscape is constantly evolving, an organisation’s culture should also be changing.
To get a clear definition of your current organisational culture, you could start by identifying the core values you want that culture to be built upon. These can be sourced from input from leadership and employees alike, to see what the values of the company currently are, and what the desired values of the future will be.
Once you have these values defined and agreed upon, it can be helpful to publish them, whether that’s in an employee handbook, the company website, or anywhere else that would be helpful and appropriate. This creates a concrete goal for an organisational culture that all employees can refer to and use to guide their behaviours and actions.
Showcase your organisational culture on job adverts
When thinking about how to write effective job descriptions, don’t forget to include some details of your organisation’s culture. This is your chance to advertise the cultural fit to candidates, who then have the chance to self-filter if they do not believe they will be a good fit.
To showcase culture on job adverts and find candidates who might be a good fit from a cultural perspective, employers can look to:
- Highlight company values and how they’re reflected in the day-to-day.
- Describe team dynamics and collaborative practices within the organisation.
- Explain opportunities for professional growth and development on offer.
- Describe the typical work environment, including any flexible working arrangements.
- Mention any unique perks or benefits that reflect the organisation’s values.
Develop a structured interview process
Having a consistent approach to interviewing can help in your assessment of a candidate’s cultural fit, especially by including questions that specifically touch on this. It’s one of the key benefits of competency-based interviews, so we recommend using this type of interview to keep things structured and objective.
Here are some example interview questions to ask candidates to determine culture fit:
- What do you appreciate most about working in a team?
- What professional achievement are you most proud of?
- What is your ideal work environment?
- Can you tell me about a time when you had to adapt to a new company culture, and the challenges you faced?
- What is your ideal management style to get the best out of you?
- How do you typically handle workplace conflicts or disagreements with colleagues?
Incorporate cultural fit assessments into onboarding
Getting cultural fit right isn’t just about the hiring process. When you’ve hired a new employee, their onboarding presents a great opportunity to reinforce and validate cultural fit assessments made during the hiring process. By integrating culture-focused activities into the onboarding programme, you can make sure new hires fully grasp and align with the organisation’s ethos.
This could involve orientation sessions that explore the organisation’s:
- Core values
- History
- Vision for the future
Interactive workshops can help newcomers understand how these principles translate into daily operations and decision-making, while pairing new employees with cultural ambassadors or mentors can provide insights into the organisation’s ways of working.
This means any misalignments with company culture can be addressed early on, and remedial action taken if necessary. This approach not only reinforces cultural fit but also sets the stage for long-term engagement and retention.
Be aware of bias
Finally, a key part of any successful hiring process is being aware of both conscious and unconscious biases and working to mitigate them. This is also true when it comes to assessing the cultural fit of job applicants.
Remember, hiring for cultural fit isn’t about identifying people who share interests, lifestyles, or backgrounds with the hiring manager or other colleagues. It’s actually about identifying candidates who fit with the organisation’s values and established ways of working.
There are numerous ways that employers can work to reduce bias in the hiring process whilst still focusing on hiring candidates who appear to be a good cultural fit. This includes:
- Using structured interview processes
- Implementing diverse hiring panels
- Removing identifying information from candidate’s application materials