Peter Smith: The Importance of Culture in Hiring

Is it my imagination or are we getting important hiring decisions wrong with greater frequency than ever before?

Just in the past few days, I’ve heard of a handful of people leaving positions after very short periods.

This includes employees who relocated for their new roles and within weeks or months were gone, leaving a trail of disappointment, dejection, and wasted financial resources.

Why is that? Why are so many companies getting it so wrong?

Or, are the candidates getting it wrong?

Bob Corlett, the founder and president of Staffing Advisors, wrote in the Washington Business Journal, “Most people are hired for skills but fired for ‘fit.’ People who don’t ‘fit in’ don’t last long in most organizations.” 

If we assume that those candidates were appropriately vetted, their backgrounds checked, and their suitability for the positions satisfied, then the disconnect between performance and expectation, as evidenced by the hasty departures, clearly points to a problem.

Nobody wants to start a new job and find out in short order that they’ve made a mistake. 

No employer wants to undertake the oftentimes stressful and time-consuming process of interviewing people, salary negotiations, potential relocations, and the deployment of resources for onboarding to have to unwind so quickly. 

So, why does that continue to happen and what can we do about it? 

Culture has sometimes been described as the water in which a fish swims. He doesn’t know it’s water, he has no frame of reference, and he couldn’t describe it to you even if you spoke fish and asked him (don’t spend too much time thinking about what fish sounds like; it’s a secret language). 

If we take the fish and water metaphor to its next logical step, consider what happens when a fish is removed from water. 

That image of a fish fighting for survival is not unlike the feeling one has when they find themselves in a culture that is fundamentally misaligned with who they are. 

That awful realization that this is a mistake can be felt from the employee and the employer, and it can happen very fast. 

The resolution can sometimes be dragged out as all sides try to find a solution, but it more often ends in separation because cultural misalignment is almost impossible to reconcile. 

Organizational culture (whether it is by design or default) rarely, if ever, adapts to a new hire; it has to be the other way around.

There are exceptions, of course. A strong new leader can change the culture of an organization if they have a mandate to do so, and the necessary time and resources to make it happen. 

Culture-fit is an intangible, but it has very tangible consequences when we get it wrong. 

The candidate can have the requisite experience, the right traits and intellect, great work ethic, and a willing and excited employer ready to engage them, and yet we still get things wrong, even with the most important hires. 

So why do we continue to make these mistakes despite the heavy cost to business, customers, and the existing teams?

In short, we continue to make hiring mistakes because we vastly underestimate the importance of culture fit.

In “Unleash Your Primal Brain,” author Tim Ash wrote, “If someone is not in accord with the behaviors and beliefs of the group, they are, by definition, a poor team member. Severe social sanctions will often fall on such people. They will either be forced to conform or removed from the group.”

That does not make them bad people. They could be great people but just not right for your group.

In condensing a solution to its most basic level, I would suggest that we document those behaviors and beliefs and then build a small portfolio of questions to be included in your interviewing process. (You do have a structured interview process, yes? Phew! Can you imagine not having one!)

Use the culture questions to fully explore the things the candidate holds dear and the things that matter most to the organization. Do they align? Are there significant disconnects?

Putting those questions together and adding them to the interview process is a critical exercise in helping the hiring manager, and the candidate, to better explore the things that could derail a relationship that otherwise checked all the boxes on talent, work ethic, experience, etc.

Some of the things that culture questions can reveal is a candidate who does not respond well to being micro-managed in an organization that is all about that.

A candidate who is excited about innovation and change in an organization that is resistant to change.

A candidate with aspirations to grow in a family business where the senior team are all related and not going anywhere.

A candidate who is most comfortable working at a deliberate pace in a company that operates at warp speed, or vice versa.

A candidate who needs a months-long ramp-up and all sorts of handholding in an organization that needs you to hit the ground running with the minimum amount of help.

There are literally dozens of reasons why someone might not work out. Sometimes it is as insidious as an incumbent employee in the organization who casts a large and destructive shadow and who the company isn’t willing to address.

In “For The Culture,” author Marcus Collins wrote, “People are looking to be a part of something just as much as you are looking for people to join you. You just have to find the right congregational fit.” 

Amen to that!