Culture Fit vs. Culture Add: Will Your Recruits Add to Company Culture?
With culture as a key differentiator for companies, it shouldn’t be approached as a static variable reinforced by culture fit. That’s why culture add has become such an important concept, which refers to companies strengthening their culture with every new hire. Today, we discuss:
- The value of culture add versus culture fit
- How looking for culture fit could be holding you back
- Four tips to hire for culture add and not a culture fit
When looking to find and acquire new talent, one of the key parameters that most organizations look for is culture fit. Is the candidate the right match for the organization’s existing set of values? Is any conflict foreseeable in the long run that might lead to attrition?
Research suggests that 59% of employees are willing to switch jobs even when their role, compensation levels, and benefits package remain the same. And this number has actually witnessed a 4% jump since 2018. What this suggests is an apparent dissonance between employee expectations from company culture and how it plays out in real-world scenarios. As your organization expands and evolves, your culture is expected to keep pace. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, leading to disengagement and attrition risks.
One of the best ways to address this is to pursue “culture add” instead of culture fit when outlining your recruitment strategy. This would ensure that your organization’s culture becomes incrementally stronger and more diverse with every hiring cycle, equipped to meet the expectations of a variety of employee groups.
Learn More: How Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, and HubSpot Build Company Culture
Culture Fit vs. Culture Add: What’s the Difference?
Culture fit tries to quantify how well a candidate can adapt to the ethical position of your organization. This can span intangible concepts such as social/cultural responsibility as well as day-to-day practices like remote working and flexible hours. Culture fit maps a candidate’s personality and professional goals to your organizational mission.
In addition to culture fit, culture add can play a significant role when you assess candidates. Here, you’re not only looking for an alignment between the candidate and your organization’s values, but you’re also seeking value add from them joining your company.
Learn More: Yes, Your Company Can Hold on to Its Culture During Rapid Growth
Why Is Culture Add So Important?
There are several reasons you should seek culture add instead of culture fit at the assessment stage of hiring. They include:
1. Prioritizing culture fit over culture add limits your professional network
Referrals are among the top channels for hiring across the globe, and the assurance of culture fit is one of its most significant advantages. Employees refer candidates who resemble them in terms of professional and personal goals and bring a similar set of values to the table. However, this could be limiting your professional network to a significant extent, leaving out capable candidates who have different but meaningful values to bring to the organization, and who can change the direction of thought in the organization.
2. Hiring for culture fit perpetuates unconscious bias
It is always challenging to prevent unconscious bias from impeding your recruitment process. Consider a scenario where a line manager manually assesses the shortlisted candidates for culture fit, without considering culture add. They will likely select candidates most closely aligned with their own views unless they are actively aware of bias risk. Over time, this can snowball into a highly biased recruitment pipeline, impacting the products you make and the services you offer.
3. Applicant pools could dry up if you hire only for culture fit
In a candidate-centric world, your employer brand is critical to attracting top talent. If candidates perceive that your company stands for a rigid, inflexible definition of company culture, they might think twice before applying for a role. Research suggests that culture makes a big difference when job seekers choose a company, and a narrow focus on culture fit could reduce the number of inbound applications.
So, how do you ensure that you make the right call, assessing for culture add and not for culture fit? What this requires is a mindset shift and an openness toward new ideas.
Learn More: 5 Exciting CultureTech Platforms to Help You Establish Company Culture
4 Tips to Hire for Culture Add, not Culture Fit
With a recruitment plan geared for culture add, you can build a workplace that evolves and becomes conducive to a variety of mindsets, ideas, and life approaches. In other words, you can retain and leverage the best talent while continually improving your culture. Here are a few tips to do this.
1. Document your company’s culture, ethical values, and long-term mission. Make sure that you honestly identify any gaps in culture – these gaps and the resulting culture will be influenced by the candidates you hire. You can do this using specific culture assessment platforms that can be integrated with your recruitment software.
2. Research organizations in the same domain/geography for inspiration. By evaluating organizations similar to yours for their culture and how they build it, you can map how your culture can become progressively stronger through recruiting for culture add.
3. Hold culture assessment sessions at the end of every screening cycle. Apart from culture add assessment tools, line managers and existing employees can interact with the candidate – meaningful takeaways from the conversation can offer indications of culture add from that particular candidate.
4. Write job descriptions that specify your search for culture add to the organization. Brand your organization as one that looks for people adding 360-degree value to it. Use intelligent job descriptions to state specifically that you don’t just want them to fit in, you want them to be a part of the culture-building process.
Learn More: What Is Culture Analytics and How Can It Help Your Organization?
Over to You
The first step towards fostering a positive company culture is to acknowledge the significance of the culture add as opposed to a mere culture fit. Remember, the concept of culture fit was a step ahead of eligibility-based hiring, asking recruiters to consider more than a candidate’s educational qualifications or past experience. Now, culture add takes this a step further, inspiring modern organizations to embrace innovation incrementally, which each new hire adding cultural value to the organization.
That’s why the debate isn’t really about culture fit versus culture add. Enlightened organizations should be looking at making the transition from culture fit to culture add, aided by the right technologies. Candidate assessment tools like ThriveMap are already looking beyond a simple culture fit, helping you to “scale your culture” so that every new hire makes the company better.
And this is only the beginning — as organizations become more conscious of the need for strong company culture, culture add is poised to replace culture fit as a determiner of candidate quality.
Where do you stand on this culture fit to culture add maturity curve? Tell us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. We are waiting to hear about your experience!
