Do you know about culture fit and how important it is to hire for… or is it?
In an era where most adults feel that a more diverse society is a positive thing, it’s a little contradictory that one of the most prominent hiring strategies focuses on onboarding people who are all the same.
Today, many talent acquisition leaders are casting aside culture fit in favor of a more inclusive–and likely more profitable–hiring strategy: culture add. We’ll explain what culture add is, how it differs from culture fit, and how to identify it when interviewing prospective candidates.
What Is Culture Add?
Culture add focuses on the unique contributions a candidate can make to an organization. What would this particular person bring to the table that’s different from all the other candidates or the company’s existing employees? Culture add is about celebrating individuality and promoting the input different types of people can offer.
When you hire for culture add, you actively seek out qualities, perspectives, and personalities that don’t already exist on the team. The goal is to build a more well-rounded, holistic workforce.
Culture add is supported by the many well-documented benefits of diverse teams in the workplace. A McKinsey report found that companies with less homogenous teams were more likely to have higher-than-average financial gains, especially if diversity existed within management. In another study of diverse versus non-diverse teams, the diverse teams proved more objective, accurate, and innovative than their non-diverse counterparts when completing various group tasks.
Working on a more diverse team indeed takes additional effort–participants must spend more time actively listening and attempting to see other points of view, for example. But the outcomes for business can pay off in terms of higher profitability and greater innovation. There’s also a greater sense of belonging among employees, which can boost retention.
Culture Add vs. Culture Fit: What’s the Difference?
So, what’s the difference between culture add and culture fit?
Culture fit describes a candidate who conforms to a company’s norms, ascribes to its values, and follows its existing way of doing things. Hiring for culture fit means seeking out candidates who are likely to share a team’s perspectives and prefer the same work style as their colleagues.
Culture add describes a candidate with a diverse perspective or different work style than what already exists on the team. Various types of diversity can contribute to culture add: demographic diversity, like age and gender; cognitive diversity, which means having a different point of view; and experiential diversity, which refers to the unique life experiences that shape how a person sees the world and operates within it.
Related: Importance of Age Diversity
The Problem With Culture Fit
Hiring for culture fit is a noble ambition. It’s supposed to mean hiring people aligned with the organization’s operations. For example, “employees who thrive here value collaboration and teamwork instead of a lone-wolf mentality.” In theory, hiring for culture fit increases efficiency, streamlines decision-making, and ensures a high level of commitment to the company’s larger goals.
In practice, however, many organizations get culture fit wrong. It’s all too easy for culture fit to be interpreted as hiring people who are “like me,” i.e., someone you can imagine grabbing a beer with or someone who’d be a great addition to the company’s rec softball team.
Take, for example, a company that makes a vegan product. If the idea of culture fit is overemphasized, hiring managers could easily envision weeding out candidates who eat meat or wear leather. This is a low-stakes example, but more problematic cases exist in many industries.
Relying too heavily on cultural fit is a slippery slope that can become a crutch for lazy hiring and an excuse for maintaining the status quo. It threatens diversity and can lead to groupthink, which inhibits innovation.
If you’ve used culture fit as a hiring benchmark, you don’t have to abandon it completely. However, it’s a good idea to examine how it impacts your team’s makeup. It might be time to start emphasizing culture add instead of fit.
Related: How to Hire for Diversity
The Benefits of Hiring for Culture Add
Hiring for culture add can benefit your organization in a number of ways. Here are a few of the top upsides to consider.
Supports diversity, equity, and inclusion
Diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI, is a business philosophy in which people of all backgrounds are accepted and supported. In addition to promoting equitable treatment of employees and helping all team members feel like they belong, DEI expands your hiring pool. Seeking out diverse candidates means you’re more apt to consider talented workers from ALL backgrounds, not just those that look similar to yours.
Promotes an evolving culture
When you have many employees with similar experience and viewpoints, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for growth. Hiring employees who bring something new to the table means your company culture is always evolving. It’s easier to adapt to keep up with changes in the market and shifts in the workforce and society as a whole. All of this makes your company a more attractive workplace and a more formidable industry force.
Provides fresh ideas
Hiring for culture add means onboarding team members with new skills, different sets of experience, diverse perspectives, and unique ways of doing things. Fresh ideas make innovating easier, which is an advantage in a competitive market.
Find the perfect fit for your team.
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How to Hire for Culture Add
Follow these steps to adopt a hiring strategy that prioritizes culture add.
1. Educate your hiring team
Now that you’ve read up on the topic, you know the difference between culture fit and culture add. But don’t assume that’s true for everyone on your hiring team. Provide training and education to ensure everyone involved in the hiring process has a solid understanding of culture add, its impact on your hiring benchmarks, and specific examples of qualities they should be looking for when hiring. Simply calling attention to your focus on culture add is a great first step in expanding awareness about this important hiring goal.
2. Incorporate it into your interview process
Though culture add is an intangible quality, you don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) rely on your gut to find it. It should be a concrete criteria you assess when hiring, right alongside technical skills and relevant experience. Use strategic interview questions to understand the diverse qualities, viewpoints, and approaches a candidate could bring to your team. You’ll find a list of suggested interview questions to help identify culture add below.
3. Change up your interview format
In addition to expanding your interview questions, you can change your interview structure to gain a broader view on culture add. Group interviews, which involve more than one candidate, offer a valuable glimpse of how unique applicants might mesh with one another and as part of your team. Panel interviews, which have more than one interviewer, allow you to incorporate more diverse perspectives into your hiring decision.
4. Use assessments
While the interview process is a crucial tool for identifying culture add, it’s also susceptible to human bias. For a more objective view of the capabilities a candidate has to offer, consider implementing pre-hire assessments. These science-backed tests focus on specific aspects of a candidate, like their preferences and behavior. Test Gorilla is just one example of an assessment platform with a dedicated culture add assessment.
5. Leverage employee surveys
Hiring for culture add has to come from the top, but it’s an initiative that shouldn’t be limited to your leadership team. Use employee feedback surveys to understand what’s working–and what’s not–with your company culture today. This will help you identify areas for improvement and pinpoint any diverse qualities that are lacking so you can zero in on finding them in your new hires.
Interview Questions to Identify Culture Add
Here are some suggested interview questions to identify candidates who will contribute to and complement your company culture.
1. How would you describe your work style?
Hiring for culture add doesn’t always mean seeking out people who do things differently than you do. Rather, it means identifying candidates who are open to doing things differently when the situation calls for it. Look for candidates who describe their work using flexible, adaptable, and collaborative words.
2. How do you define success?
Sometimes, homogenous teams can get boxed in working toward the same goals, using the same strategies they’ve always used. This can lead to complacency. A fresh perspective on success can push people to think beyond their comfort zones and break through plateaus.
3. Describe a time when your unique background helped you solve a problem.
This question gives candidates an opening to talk more about their personal background and how they use it as an asset. For hiring managers, it can give you a glimpse into how the candidate makes decisions and how that might look when incorporated into your team.
4. Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone with a different perspective on approaching a task. How did you handle it?
Shifting to a ‘culture add’ mentality will come with some discomfort; that’s almost always the case when people are confronted with viewpoints that differ from their own. It is a necessary skill to work through this discomfort to arrive at practical solutions.
5. Based on what you know about our company’s culture, values, or operations, what’s something you think we could improve?
The answers to this question can be illuminating when they come from a diverse pool of candidates. Even answers from applicants you don’t ultimately hire can be an impetus for growth.
6. What makes you different?
This is a great question because it leaves much room for interpretation. The candidate may choose to talk about their skills, upbringing, beliefs, prior achievements, personality, and more. It’s also a chance for them to highlight strengths you might not have thought to ask about.
7. What values are important to you in an employer?
Culture add doesn’t mean finding individuals who completely depart from the people you usually hire. This would be a recipe for chaos. There are some elements on which it’s important to be aligned regardless of background or perspective. While seeking out diverse viewpoints, ensure you’re on the same page with prospective candidates about the bigger things, like your company’s mission and core values.
8. Describe your ideal work environment.
When hiring for culture add, you want to set candidates up for success. An applicant with an awesome, nontraditional background might have a lot to offer your team, but they won’t be very happy or successful if they prefer to work outdoors and your work is done strictly in an office. Asking about candidates’ preferred work environment will help you gauge their ability to thrive in the role.
9. How do you handle conflict?
Unique perspectives mean that sometimes coworkers clash. It’s one of the challenges of hiring for culture. Identifying candidates who are armed with healthy conflict resolution skills will ensure your team is able to overcome its differences and work together effectively.
By shifting your focus from culture fit to culture add, you’ll be less susceptible to the downsides of having a homogenous team and enjoy the many benefits that stem from greater diversity.
