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? 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........