From Culture Fit to Values Fit

Culture Fit, according to a leading employee experience platform, is “the concept of screening potential candidates to determine what type of cultural impact they would have on the organization.”

It emerged as a concept in the late 1980s and 1990s, with workplace researchers exploring the factors that help an employee gel into a role – or not. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, recruiting for Culture Fit was de rigueur amongst hiring professionals. Naturally, it was felt, poor fit = bad outcomes (and research at the time made this case clear), and thus “Culture fit interviews” became the norm. It became so popular in fact that one researcher, studying the period 2006-8, found that more than 50% of hiring managers saw Culture Fit as THE most important criterion in job interviews.

Most notably, the term was popularised by tech companies looking for workers that would mesh well into their (largely white, male) teams. And Culture Fit, as practiced, often by employees without much preparation – too often became simply a question of personality fit. It was common to talk of the “airport” test – if you ran into the candidate in an airport, would you want to go and say hello? – and interviewers of all seniorities were encouraged to prioritize, capture and act on this very subjective sense of “fit” with them and their team/employer.

This fetishizing of Culture Fit, though, and the rapport-based hiring that it encouraged in practice, had (and has) substantial and often hidden problems.

For example, we see in our work at Uptimize just how easy it is for organizations to unintentionally exclude talented applicants who think differently. Even when such applicants are the strongest fit on paper, based on skills and experience, many find themselves disadvantaged and excluded by interviewers who subconsciously expect and prioritize a certain type of presentation.

As people will naturally gravitate to people they view as similar, rapport-focused Culture Fit can also perpetuate a lack of diversity. This became increasingly intolerable and under the microscope through the 2010s, a decade that saw both inclusion and ‘diversity of thought’ rightly celebrated. In this context, Culture Fit interviews began to be questioned as a potentially dangerous obstacle to building teams with different viewpoints, experiences, perspectives and thinking styles.

More recently, there has been a full on backlash against Culture Fit. “We still rely on "people we want to hang out with" as a metric in hiring, and it does nothing but harm”, railed the Huffington Post in a not-untypical article entitled Why 'Culture Fit' Is A Failed Idea In American Hiring. Contrast too HR industry body SHRM’s earlier advice on how to screen for Culture Fit back in 2009 with the blunt command “Don’t Hire for Culture Fit” in an article in 2022.

With such attacks has come the exhortation, instead, to hire for “Culture Add”. The idea – fact – here is that cultures are richer when more varied, and that rather than prioritising a homogenous, set organizational culture, hiring managers should embrace difference and new perspectives. This, of course, makes sense, and should be encouraged.

But is the idea of ‘fit’ truly obsolete? I would argue no, and would propose the following approach to hiring – one that rejects Culture Fit based on rapport, and elevates both what we can call “Role Fit” and “Values Fit”.

Role Fit, as argued in Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s seminal “The A Method for Hiring” (2008) is about focusing first and foremost on the outcomes required from a particular role, and then distilling from this the skills and experience necessary to deliver these outcomes. Smart and Street noted presciently how easy it was instead for hiring to be based on biases, rapport and preconceptions (and remember, this was during Culture Fit’s heyday!) – all, as they stressed, likely to be unhelpful factors in determining true job performance.

What can perfectly complement this foremost focus on Role Fit is a focus on Values Fit. Organizational values play an important role as a brand differentiator and talent magnet – and even more importantly, as a shaper of culture and upholder of cultural standards. Many organizations think deeply about their values, and those that emerge admirable, but too often buried and lacking practical awareness or application. Indeed, we often hear at Uptimize stories from neurodivergent employees about how the reality ‘on the ground’ did not match an organization’s values and aspirations.

When brought to life, though, such values can play an incredibly important role – and they can and should be treasured. Hiring people not for personality fit but – consciously and fairly - for Values Fit, then, becomes the key replacement for the distorted, rapport-based Culture Fit of the past.

Let’s explore how two organizations – both with (neuro)inclusion at their heart – put this into practice.

First is the award-winning Rising Tide Car Wash, a car wash franchise in Florida that has spawned thousands of column inches for its work hiring primarily autistic employees.

Rising Tide first figured out the specific attributes that would mesh with their own values, and then they came up with a formula for very structured and consistent interviews to test against this. “Talent is contextual. What makes for a rockstar in your business looks totally different from what makes a rockstar in my business”, founder Tom D’Eri says, and part of this is that values are unique. Rising Tide didn’t shy away from looking for certain ‘make or break traits’ that they knew would be critical in their very specific context. The organization’s success bears out such an approach: not only does it have a highly diverse workforce, its retention data is far above comparable norms.

Values Fit is something we practice at Uptimize, too. Our simple one-word values are Teamwork, Data and Learning. We have a specific part of our candidate assessment that centrepieces these, with the same questions asked of every candidate (and in our case, offered in advance) that look to explore and highlight how an applicant will fit into our own ways of working. Like Rising Tide, we have seen evidence to back this up – a highly (neuro) diverse team, and a Top 10 ranking in Tech National’s Top 100 Companies to Work for 2024.

-

Culture Fit, then, in the sense of subjective, bias-ridden assessments of personality and rapport, is rightly on its last legs.

Organizations that focus instead on true fit for a position – firstly in terms of skills and experience, AND also on values – can achieve what Culture Fit was always designed to achieve, but too often fails to.