Culture Add vs. Culture Fit
Your workplace environment comprises the values, expectations, attitudes, and behaviors employees share throughout the company. This creates a culture that is unique to your business and workplace.
Is it better to hire someone who’s a perfect match for your culture already OR someone who can add new perspectives?
Culture Fit refers to hiring people who contribute to your culture means seeking those who align with your company’s mission and values.
Culture Add is the strategy where an organization recruits people that are dissimilar to their current makeup and therefore are trying to be more are diverse.
This blog post highlights the benefits of hiring candidates with diverse perspectives and helps ensure your hiring process is steered in the right and most updated direction.
Difference between Culture Fit and Culture Add
Culture Fit
Understanding what cultural fit means is important to recognize it in the hiring process. Cultural fit shares the same behaviors, values, interests, and work preferences. It attempts to create a team of identically minded people.
To fit into a company could mean the employee must have some similarities with the team, leading to largely homogenous employee networks. These networks can therefore lack diversity, lack challenging thoughts or ideas, and lack differing perspectives.
Culture Fit Example
If collaboration is integral to daily operations, an employee who works well on teams and appreciates the input of a variety of people is likely to work well in your organization.
An employee who wants to work alone most of the time may be a better cultural fit. Once executives and managers identify the values and behaviors that create your workplace's culture, they can create a culture fit by modelling and rewarding the behaviors they want to see in their employees.
Culture Add
On the other hand, culture add looks for new and interesting people who know what they can bring to the table. Culture add hiring also relates to employers seeing differences as problems instead of seeing them as an opportunity.
Culture add is when an employee is hired to add diversity to the team’s culture (for example, different skills, personalities, backgrounds, etc.). Hiring for culture add means hiring team members that bring something new to the table instead of perfectly matching the current team.
Culture add is about making your team heterogeneous instead of homogeneous as it allows for each team member to be unique.
Culture Add Example
Let’s say you have a work team with a specific daily routine. They work well together, keep up the quota, and do things as they've always been.
You bring in someone new, a curious, energetic person who might, with cultural fit, be seen as a disruption. This new hire likes to walk during their lunch break, stand up from their desk to stretch every hour, and tends to genuinely question “why” when told, “this is how things are done around here.”
Soon enough, more of the team starts taking walks at lunch and takes a computer break to stretch every hour. When questioned with the “why,” they eventually realized that things don’t always have to be so homogenous, so they eventually become more open to new processes.
How to Hire for Culture Add instead of Culture Fit
Culture add hiring works to find candidates who would improve the culture at the company based on diversity and a unique skill set.
To successfully implement culture add, here are some strategies to use when hiring new members on your team:
Have Clear Company Values
A company’s vision consists of core values that shape its culture and ultimately drive your team’s performance. It’s vital to be aware of the company values before seeking out your potential candidates.
Company values is the definition of how team members dwell together and interact daily. If you don’t take the time to outline the ethics, morals and values that you wish to portray in your company, you will run into confusion and setbacks.
When your company's core values are outlined and implemented, every decision will be made with those values in mind.
Use Standardized Testing
To measure values in your candidates and to mitigate any biases, you need to use standard tests when interviewing your candidates. Standardizing the hiring process means applying the same hiring methods for all candidates. This includes communicating with them the same way and advancing them to the same hiring stage.
Standardization is so important for a structured hiring process because it eliminates inconsistencies and bias, which will, in turn, improve the candidate experience and lead to better quality hires and increased productivity.
If employers redirect their interviewing processes and evaluate candidates along the same domains, they increase their ability to determine the most suitable fit among various roles based on personality and experiences.
Compare Candidates on an Objective Scale
Unconscious bias can hinder diversity, recruitment efforts, potential promotions, and company retention rates. With personality and pre-employment tests, companies can select candidates on an objective and bias-free scale.
This will help to no longer have to rely on the employer’s personal impressions, but can now examine the quantifiable results to assess a candidate’s value on an objective scale. Employees who feel they are hired relatively and without bias are more likely to be satisfied with their job and less likely to leave the company.
Interview Questions
Interview questions are the cornerstone to identifying whether a candidate’s working style and expectations are a good match for your company. Use the values interview model of questions that invites job candidates to demonstrate behaviours, values, and perspectives. Focus on diversity, transparency, and customer focus.
Questions you might ask include:
How a candidate’s team members benefit from working with them
How they personally benefit a team when working with colleagues
What traits do they most value in a team and managers
How they responded in a difficult situation and how they solved this situation creatively
An example of a time they had to decide between getting something done quickly vs. getting it done with lots of time and effort
Skills, interests, or passions they have that set them apart from others
A time when understanding another person's perspective was beneficial in the workplace
Their impression of the company’s culture and ways for the company to improve
Conclusion
Hiring for culture adds is an innovative way to strengthen your work team. Why fill your office with employees that all have similar personalities as each other when you can have an office with a creative team who have open minds and varying experiences?
Using culture adds throughout your productive hiring process to ensure a vibrant and positive team, increasing productivity, diversity, and inclusion throughout your company.