Why Hiring for “Culture Fit” Hurts Your Culture
paperplanes.de
paperplanes.de
There's a rule of thumb in that world: "Good hang, good music, good money: don't take the gig if you don't have at least two out of three." If the money isn't good, at least the people and the music are. If the music sucks, at least you can spend your money with people you like. If the people suck, at least you can justify sticking around because it's worth it as a musician and you're well compensated.
Working for a startup or small company is very similar to being in a band, in my experience. And in the beginning, the money isn't great, and so if you're going to be happy there you make double extra sure that the technology (music) and the culture (the hang) work for everyone.
I get what this guy is saying: don't handicap your ability as a team to grow and innovate just because a potential hire doesn't care about the kegerator, or cannot, out of nature or obligation keep the same crazy hours as other members of the team. But when the going gets rough, there's nothing like having a sense of mutual respect and understanding among team members. You do want your team to develop a sense of camaraderie. Likewise, you do want your new hires to be able to fit in and communicate in productive ways. You want your team members to care about one another.
I have been in on hiring people where 'culture fit' has been a topic. On at least three occasions I can think of people hired for a team where yellow flags raised during the interview under the rubric of culture fit actually did become problem later on: failures in ability to argue or communicate honestly or effectively; superiority complexes glimpsed during an interview turned into unneeded friction later on, etc.
On the other hand, there have been hires where the 'culture fit' issue was raised before the hiring which turned out to be unfounded.
I think the key is to truly understand yourself and your own group dynamics before adding more people to the soup.
I love that explanation.
I think the problem that most people get into is going after one of them alone or having one outweigh the others significantly. I have yet to see that work long term.
Are these really culture fit issues, though? Does anyone pride themselves on having a culture of miscommunication?
E.g. can you approach the C-suite directly, or have to go through their assistants? Can meeting participants cut things off if it's unproductive, or is that feedback shared privately afterward? Is really vigorous (perhaps intimidating) debate an expectation, or are people more laid back about discussing ideas? To what extent can you express emotions, and which emotions? Two companies can totally be "feedback-oriented" yet drastically differ on when, how, and to whom feedback is given/received—none objectively The Right Way, just different cultures.
To me this is all culture, hard to judge pre-hire, and hard to adopt if it's really not your style.
It's not an argument against the idea of hiring for culture fit though- rather it's an excellent description of just how toxic some startup cultures can be, and how interviewers can abuse the culture fit concept (intentionally or not) to discriminate against people who are different from them.
Those are bad but there are also legitimate clashes of "culture fit" and almost every blog writer that complains about it is leaving it out.
For example, consider a software team writing rocket guidance software for NASA or SpaceX. They are very disciplined about bottom-up analysis, 100% code path coverage, proofs of algorithm correctness, etc. However, they interview a candidate that is somewhat of a cowboy coder (a duct tape programmer)[1]. He's smart and competent but he doesn't fit their culture.
The team can acknowledge that the duct tape programmers are not inferior to overly cautious and disciplined programmers. The team can also acknowledge that the fast-paced world needs duct programmers. However, they just don't need him on their particular team.
If pressed for reason for why they rejected him, it's very easy to fall back on the simple phrase "culture fit" instead of itemizing an inventory of intellectual incompatibilities. Teams can reject candidates for other reasons besides the He's-Not-White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-22-year-old angle.
I guess they could add an adjective and say it was "intellectual culture fit" but that phrase isn't commonplace enough that people would instinctively use it.
Just consider that some clashes of "culture fit" are intellectual instead of ethnic discrimination and engineers are not always the best at articulating why they rejected candidates for legitimate reasons.
Sometimes it really means you have a specific culture you want to maintain. But you better watch out if you do this, at some point, all the "yes people" in your culture will end up missing something that would be obvious to someone who doesn't fit your culture.
Basically, if you hire for "Culture Fit", you're saying that diversity is bad...
I deduced that "cultural fit" translated to the fact I was over 35.
Frankly, my opinion is that fit is equally important as skill set. The difference between a good team and a great one often comes down to chemistry, which causes the group to come together under pressure, to support one another, to coach and help one another, etc.
[1] (pdf) http://advancesearch.com/culturefit/whitepages/Person%20cult...
I recently got a 'culture fit' rejection. Towards the bottom of the e-mail they welcomed follow-up questions from me. I would love to respond and ask the questions above, but I also believe most rejections in life are a good thing and if someone comes up with some ridiculous excuse like 'culture fit' I'm better off not working for such a silly company.
However, in agreement I've noticed that a lot of company/startup "culture" tends to exclude anyone not a late-twenties white|asian male with skinny jeans. Here's a few job pages I've looked at recently:
https://www.planet.com/assets/themes/planet/images/team/taho...
Look at some of these photos, and struggle to find a team member from the majority of the population who is homely, or chubby, or female, or $other_minority, over thirty, or god-forbid over forty.
No wonder it is so hard to find people when you exclude 90% of the population.
"Ribbing" a recovering alcoholic because they won't join you for drinks would be rather insensitive. By the time young people are old enough to be in the workforce, they ought to be a bit more mature than that. (The author mentions that "I've been a non-alcoholic for more than 16 years now".)
I don't expect complete diversity, but those photos are surprisingly homogeneous.
Generally an onsite interview comprises of a series (minimum 2, may go up to 4) of technical interviews which might involve whiteboard coding or coding on a laptop (my current company use this approach - partly inspired by Stripe's interview process where candidates are told to bring their own laptops and use their language/editor/IDE of choice). The coding itself should take anything from 20 (very strong candidates) to 40 minutes, and the remaining 15-20 mins is used to ostensibly allow the interviewee to the interviewer(s) questions, and sometimes these questions/discussions are used to assess culture fit. Like, is the interviewee opinionated about something (which is them used to 'score' the interviewee between 1-10 on 'ego').
Some companies insist on 'lunch' with the candidate, which WOULD be nice if you're having lunch with your team members/engineers, but a lot of times these you're just shown the way to the cafeteria and told to help yourselves, where you find yourself among a sea of strangers laughing/talking about something and you try making small talk (if you're socially awkward or introverted, you fail this test right away). Now, not all companies' lunch interviews are this bad, but some just insist on one and do NOTHING to make the interviewee feel at home (maybe that's the whole point?).
Then there would be a separate 'culture fit' interview AFTER all the coding interviews, usually with the CTO/VP of Engineering/Director of Engineering. This would entail being either asked to rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 on specific tools/technologies, asked about how you deal with conflicts, how you disagree with others when you have to, what side projects you work on and so forth.
At some companies, a culture fit interview is an interview with non-technical folk, who'll ask you for the UMPTEENTH time why you want to work at this company, what are your hobbies, what do you do during your weekends/in your free time, what are your favorite bars, where do you hike/work out, what books you read, what artists you listen to yada yada.
Some companies also insist on the candidate grabbing drinks/breakfast with current employees. I've done a 'breakfast' interview where ALL the engineers were drunk to varying degrees (they'd just had a huge party the previous evening). Generally, this is again a way of seeing if the candidate is someone you'd like to grab drinks with, or would like to hang out with socially after work. Depending on the company, this might involve speaking about tech, or as often as not, not saying a word about the job and just treating it like an evening/morning with old friends.
It's hard to know what exactly to say, and one has to walk the tightrope between sounding and seeming confident and cool and NOT coming across as egoistic/too opinionated and obnoxious. A lot of times, the same answers garner different responses from different teams, and in general, I personally believe these kind of interviews/questions should be banned since it's really no indicator of skill. The people I enjoy hanging out with may not always be the people I want to work with 40 hours a week. Unfortunately, likability is a major factor that goes into the hiring decision.
If it's between two people with the same skill level you obviously pick the person you can best see yourself working side by side with for the next years to come. There is nothing strange about this.
Be yourself and you will end up in a place where someone with your skills and personality will fit in
The reason many startups don't explicitly state their expectations around "culture fit" is that reasonable, ethical people would find them to be unacceptable. In some cases, these expectations are associated with criteria that companies are not legally permitted to use in making hiring decisions.
More importantly, "cultural fit" is a good catchall for probably the most important aspect of hiring someone: Your instinctual, gut feeling about the person. Do they seem like someone you want to work with 8 hours a day? Is there something "off" about them?
These are incredibly important subconscious criteria that can't be explicitly codified, and the term "cultural fit" is a good umbrella term for them.
An old person doesn't fit the culture of a young tech startup. A woman doesn't fit the culture of the executive level. A black person doesn't fit the culture of the new neighborhood. A guy that works out every day doesn't fit the culture of a disruptive and innovative company.
'Instinctual, gut feels' can tap into gender bias, racial concerns, stuff you wouldn't rationally accept if you said them out loud. By discarding reason when evaluating an employee subconscious discrimination comes to the fore.
On the other hand I've been burned multiple times when I have gone against my gut instinct.
Run a food startup? I expect the people there to be at least much more interested in the space than average, even if they're working on a purely technical role.
Music business? Events? Cars? Clothing?
Look, if you're going to be busting ass while getting funding and traction and you'll be inevitably spending a lot of time getting these things right, the kind of person involved has to have a personal interest beyond their job description. You need to understand customers and the business, and empathizing and knowing where to look in those spaces is more than just having business acumen.
You can hire without regarding culture fit if you're a medium-sized business and above where people have clearly defined roles and specialties. But when passion and interest are just as important as putting in the effort, I want to work with people whom I have more than just a cordial time at the office.
Actually, it could be an advantage to have people around who have only an average interest in your product - they can provide valuable insight into how the average consumer might react to your product. If your food startup is unconsciously geared toward the top 1% of picky eaters because everyone in your company belongs to that group, you're not going to have a very big market. If everyone in your car company drives a Ferrari, you're going to be at a disadvantage selling minivans to suburban parents.
It is always better to have at least an above-average knowledge of any industry you want to be part of. The narrative of outside players coming in and having success is very nice, but it's based on the premise that the people involved were originally very passionate and picked up the ropes very quickly.
People are looking for the wrong culture fit.
I care intensely about cultural fit, but could care less about gender, ethnicity, race, political inclinations, sexuality, and other non-work behaviors.
I care intensely about a culture of automated tests, automated deployment, campsite rule (leaving something better than you found it), clean code, empathy as a core engineering principle, and other cultural issues where reasonable people disagree. I can respect Michael O. Church's opinions on agile, for example, but I think that we would be best fit working in different companies.
Take Lyft and Uber for example. Both are ostensibly doing very similar things yet I know people at both and I can confidently say very few people could work happily in both places. If you work at Uber, you have to be OK with stripping an entire research lab to build up your self driving car department. If you work at Lyft, you have to be OK that Lyft hasn't expanded internationally yet as they're cautiously focusing on the US.
Even though Lyft and Uber are looking for the same skillset in their employees, the pools they're hiring from are almost completely distinct. People interpret "not a culture fit" as a negative thing, as if it's about that person not being good enough for the company's culture. Instead, when "not a culture fit" is said honestly, it simply means that, even though both of you want to accomplish the same things, you want to accomplish them in different ways and there's other, better places for your talents.
Similarly, companies should look long and hard at their Product/Culture fit and, if they do indeed find it lacking on some ways, actively recruit people who have the force of will to alter their culture. This is much harder, however and has to come from the top.
In a lot of cases, I think it's better to get rejected up front than to get hired on only to realize later on that you've landed in a bad situation. To me if a company wants to reject you based on culture fit, many times it's a blessing in disguise.
In the end I'm glad it didn't work out, for one it grounded me, apparently my shit does stink. It also helped me recognize that I really do enjoy working with all stripes of people and would hate to give that up. I also feel like I get bonus points for not joining a cult.
If you think it's about excluding people who have kids or don't want to drink all night you're actually giving them too much credit.
Early stage companies need a homogeneous culture. Their advantage is moving quickly. Hiring similar people is good.
Later stage companies need diversity. Hiring similar people is bad.
Hence why scaling is so difficult and why so many early stage employees wash out in later stages.