One of my standard statements is that the ability to do a job is not a guarantee to get the job - it is just the base requirement to even be considered.
Is it? I fail to see how preferring Dr Who over BSG is relevant to becoming a great employee, or more seriously, how hiring managers selecting for "cultural fit" doesn't end up as 'I prefer to work with people who put work ahead of family, health, and sanity.' With maybe a tinge of discrimination bias.
IMO, the right place for cultural fit isn't in the hiring step, it's in the recruiting and application steps, when you broadcast what your workplace environment is, what the priorities are, and then applicants choose to work within that culture or not.
It's code for "just like us". "Cultural fit" is important for workplaces which contain a number of people already who couldn't work with someone different; at that point, you look out over your homogenous banks of identikit employees, and wonder how vulnerable you've become because you all think the same, and how many excellent applicants you've turned down because they weren't just like us.
If anything, you should hire for NOT cultural fit. You should hire for people who think differently, who will bring new ideas, new perspectives. Who will see the gaps in your current products because they're bringing a different perspective. Instead of hiring the same person over and over, duplicating existing ways of thinking and reinforcing the same mistakes, the same vulnerabilites, the same blind spots, hire people who can fill in those gaps and actually bring something new to the table and see those mistakes and those vulnerabilites.
People do work differently. They have their own communication styles, leadership styles, and working styles. Some of those styles work better together than others. That is is not a judgment call of saying any one style is better or worse, it is just saying that mixing incompatible styles can build a dysfunctional team. So knowing who you have on board, and how they work and communicate, lets you hire compatible styles.
This has nothing to do with diversity of people. Very diverse people can still have compatible working styles.
I genuinely believe that you believe everything you say. That you think you're objective, and really very fair indeed, and that deep down, you believe you're probably actually more objective and more fair than average.
But when I look around, I see company after company after company that hires people just like them. It's impossible to tell what someone's working style is from an interview. Impossible to tell even from one of those hip auditons that the kids like these days, asking someone to take a day's holiday and waste their time in a potential employers office. It's impossible. So people tell themselves "cultural fit", just like you do, and they hire someone who looks like them, dresses like them, thinks like them.
That person almost certainly does have a compatible working style, because that person is the same as the other employees, so now you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you had some good intuition there about working styles, and that applicant with the accent who has a very different background probably never would have worked out.
You're right, it's nothing to do with diversity. That's just something that doesn't happen when you hire for "cultural fit".
Don't waste your time reasoning with me, I have you on the one hand, and on the other hand company after company after company of homogenised employees. Who am I going to believe? You, or the evidence?
We need 1) skilled people who can 2) learn and 3) work in a team. That's it, and that's one of several reasons we're interviewing anonymously, through IM - no names or CVs.
Maybe none of us will disagree with it. Few of us have a problem with a "no asshole rule", for instance.
Precision is important here, because it needs to be communicated to everyone who interviews, lest "culture fit" assume its inevitable role of "escape hatch for allowing interviewers who are having a bad day to neg anyone who doesn't jump out at them as someone they'd enjoy having a beer with".
In any case, this thread is starting to feel toxic to me, so I'm not all that interested in getting even deeper into it by answering your questions, even though I do appreciate the respectful and helpful way in which you asked. Thanks for that.
But this may be a topic better addressed another day, using a different venue.
I understand it means you want people just like you. I understand it means that there is a total lack of diversity at your place of employment. I understand you have chosen to write this because you are not able to express what you need clearly enough and perhaps not in legal, professional terms.
So, it's a very easy filter for me. Thanks :)
That's fair, but I think the issue is that some people with the ability to do a job are being rejected out of hand, often due to assumptions and biases that folks might not even be aware they possess. For example, the community college candidate.
I've watched folks with non-conventional backgrounds struggle to even get that first phone call, even for jobs it's clear they are fully capable of doing. Once that's established, sure, culture fit and other things have to come into play (can they function in your kind of company? do they have a passion for the space? and whatever else you hire for).