“Not a culture fit” is an easy reason to give in a debrief and a hard one to check. Ask three interviewers what they meant and you may get three answers: the candidate wouldn’t cope with the pace, wouldn’t get on with the team, or simply didn’t remind anyone of a colleague who did well.
Culture matters in a senior hire, especially in HR, where the person will shape how everyone else is hired, paid and managed. The problem is assessing it with a word nobody has defined. This guide replaces that word with something interviewers can ask about and score.
Notice what “fit” turns into
When fit isn’t defined, interviewers fill the gap with similarity. The sociologist Lauren Rivera studied hiring at elite professional service firms, drawing on 120 interviews with the people who made the decisions. Employers looked for candidates who were culturally similar to themselves in their leisure pursuits, their experiences and how they presented themselves, and those concerns often outweighed concerns about how productive the candidate would be.
None of that tells you whether someone can take a leadership team through a pay review or rebuild trust after a badly handled restructuring. And the risk grows with seniority. A Head of HR is often hired to change how a business works, and the person best placed to change it may be the one least like the people doing the hiring.
Look at your last three “not a fit” rejections and write down what the interviewer actually saw. If nobody can say, the phrase was standing in for a judgment nobody made.
Turn each value into a behaviour you can ask about
Hiring for culture add doesn’t mean ignoring culture. It means being specific about it. Interviewers can’t assess a value written on a wall. They can assess what a candidate did, in a real situation, that shows the value.
- 1 Value
The value as you state it
"We say what we think."
- 2 Behaviour
What someone who holds it does
Raises a problem with a senior colleague early, with evidence, before it becomes a crisis.
- 3 Question
What you ask every candidate
"Tell me about a time you disagreed with a decision made above you. What did you do, and what happened next?"
- 4 Score
What strong and weak answers contain
Strong: raised it early, gave reasons, accepted the outcome. Weak: said nothing, or complained once the decision had gone wrong.
For each value, write four things: the behaviour that shows it, one question that asks for a real example, and what a strong and a weak answer contain. Keep it to three or four values. More than that and interviewers stop using the sheet.
Write the sheet before the search starts, and give every interviewer the same one.
Ask what the team lacks
The second half of culture add is about the team, not the candidate. Before the search, list what the team this person will join doesn’t have today. It might be experience of a market, a way of working, or a kind of disagreement nobody voices at the moment.
A leadership team of founders who have only worked in start-ups may need an HR leader who has run a people function through a sale or a merger. A team that agrees too quickly may need someone who will ask for the evidence. Neither person will feel like a natural fit in the first interview, which is the point.
Culture fit
Asks whether the candidate is like the people already here.
- Judged on rapport, background and shared interests
- Each interviewer uses their own idea of fit
- Hard to tell apart from bias
Culture add
Asks whether the candidate holds your values and brings something the team lacks.
- Values written as behaviours, scored the same way for everyone
- Gaps in the team named before the search
- Scores recorded before the debrief
Write the gap into the brief as one line, and add an interview question that tests for it.
Score before anyone talks
Similarity does most of its damage in the debrief. Once the most senior person in the room says they liked a candidate, the others tend to adjust their view.
Ask each interviewer to score the candidate against the values sheet, with one line of evidence per score, before the debrief starts. Collect the scores first, then discuss where they differ. When someone says a candidate “isn’t a fit”, ask which value they mean and what the candidate said or did.
This is the same discipline that makes structured interviews work. In a 2022 re-analysis of selection research, Sackett and colleagues found that structured interviews, where every candidate gets the same questions and the same scoring guide, had the highest average validity of the methods they compared: .42, against .19 for unstructured interviews.
Collect written scores before the debrief, every time, for every candidate.
Know where culture add goes wrong
Culture add can be misused too. “They’d bring something different” can become a way to wave through someone who doesn’t share a value the business depends on, such as being straight with clients. Adding to a culture assumes there is a base to add to.
A team that hires someone to challenge it also has to be ready to be challenged. If the founders will overrule every change in the first month, the new person will leave, and the cause was the decision to hire them, not the candidate.
Decide which values are non-negotiable, say so in the brief, and assess them the same way for every candidate.
Define the culture before you hire for it
Fit and add both need a definition. Without one, “fit” defaults to similarity, and the shortlist starts to look like the people choosing from it. With values written as behaviours and the team’s gap written as one line in the brief, you can assess both the same way for every candidate.
On our searches, the values sheet and the gap are part of the brief we agree with the client before we approach anyone. Our Head of HR search page explains how that works.
Sources
- Lauren A. Rivera, “Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms”, American Sociological Review 77(6), 999–1022, 2012: https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412463213
- Paul R. Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher M. Berry and Filip Lievens, “Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range”, Journal of Applied Psychology 107(11), 2040–2068, 2022: https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994