Jo Major, Founder of Diversity in Recruitment & Co-Founder of Inclusive Recruitment Foundations, DEI Training for Recruiters and Hiring Managers issues a challenge for more care around recruitment decisions.
Want to know what the most commonly misused term in hiring is?
Culture fit.
Whenever I ask a recruiter, an interviewer or a hiring manager to explain their culture, I almost always get a handful of subjective cliche statements, often reflecting a singular perspective on how that person ‘feels’ about their business.
All too often, what I hear is more aligned with social fit. For example, we all get along, socialise together, have loads in common, share the same interests, and like each other. We are a bit like a family.
It just always feels a bit messy. And that’s the really scary bit for me because so many of our hiring decisions seem to depend on these hard-to-explain hunches, feelings, and the likeability factor.
I believe that not understanding the fundamental difference between culture fit and social fit costs businesses thousands due to failed recruitment processes, empty seats, increased agency spend, repeated attempts at finding impossible likeable unicorns and bad hires.
It’s also damaging employers’ reputations, as candidates with extraordinary skills and experience are rejected despite their commitment to brutal interview schedules and their perfectly matched capabilities to meet every single one of the job requirements.
So, what is the likeability factor?
We look for safety and familiarity in other humans. We hire people we like because they mirror ourselves, others we like, and those with similar backgrounds and beliefs.
Affinity with a candidate is one of the most powerful and influential biases in recruitment and hiring; it feeds that mythical ‘gut instinct’ and is directly responsible for building homogenous teams packed full of sameness.
I still see many using social fit and likeability to justify their need to hire people just like their existing team, and this practice goes unchallenged. In my opinion, this is the most significant risk to ALL Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in Recruitment efforts across corporate.
Full disclosure: I’ve totally benefited from this practice. I am the candidate who’s created opportunities for myself because I know how to turn on the likeability factor, especially during interviews.
It wasn’t unusual for me to go through a four-stage interview process without answering a single competency-based question and securing the offer.
It was a good job that I was a competent hire because zero evidence of that was extracted during hours of interviews; I could have quite easily been an expensive hiring disaster.
Why is it hampering our efforts to build diverse & high-performing teams
Over time, likeability hiring can see a fundamental disconnect between the skills and experiences needed to make our business grow and be successful and the actual capabilities and human resources we have hired in.
I’ve seen it happen – we liked them, so we hired them, but they didn’t work out because they didn’t perform, align with our values, work well under our leadership/management style or sit comfortably within our team dynamics.
When we reflect on how we assessed these critical criteria during hiring, we find we didn’t. It was all very subjective. Their CV looked great, they said all the right stuff, and they ‘felt’ an excellent match for our culture.
Real-time costs
Let’s not forget the recruitment and hiring resource costs. I often ask the hiring managers I train to record the financial loss of each failed recruitment project whenever the reason not to hire is down to ‘wrong fit’. The numbers get obscene, and we are often talking six figures.
Imagine identifying cash loss like that anywhere else in your business and failing to do anything about it. It just wouldn’t happen.
But culture fit is a thing, and assessing alignment matters, right?
Absolutely, IF you approach it correctly.
There is nothing wrong with figuring out if someone will work well, be happy, show up as themselves, succeed and thrive in your working environment – that’s inclusion, and all of these things contribute to retention and happy employees.
We must assess for alignment with our values, management style, and leadership qualities and understand a candidate’s preferred team dynamics, work style, how they like to contribute, their expectations of a senior leader, approach to relationship development, etc.
But before we do any of that, we need to be able to define our own culture.
Start by defining your current culture.
One of the biggest challenges recruiters, interviewers and hiring managers struggle with is assessing something they don’t quite understand or can’t articulate clearly. If this piece is missing, how do they know how to ask the right questions to score alignment?
Employers must have a clearly defined culture. They must understand the beliefs, values, and behaviours that drive the businesses and are experienced and felt daily by everyone on the shop floor, not just corporate aspirations on the reception wall.
Cultural audits must also examine leadership, management styles, company policies, and practices and recognise that these may differ on a micro and macro level across the organisation. Microcultures are not uncommon and should be acknowledged.
Feeling overwhelmed?
I get it, and we should be. This stuff isn’t about a quick half-day workshop between a bunch of leaders. It takes a much deeper dive to create a transparent culture manifesto, develop proper culture fit assessment tools, and train everyone involved in the hiring process.
The benefits of true cultural alignment are endless.
Where to start – better interviews, candidate experience, increased retention, better team dynamics, great work environments, reduced conflict, better performance and, of course, increased diversity and inclusion.
So, no more hiring for mates. We don’t have to have perfect social synergy with every new hire. Difference is powerful and innovative, and shared vision, mission and values are much better than a shared interest in personal stuff. Save that for your family and friends.
