Making great hires is about recognising great matches—and often they’re not what you’d expect.
Patty McCord | Harvard Business Review, How to Hire
According to Statista, the search industry today is valued at an estimated £30 billion. Given the significant investments organisations make in recruiting leaders, we believe it is not just worthwhile, but necessary to reassess and adapt our approach to how we measure a person’s fit into a role. By moving past the popular concept of ‘culture fit’ and challenging firms to think more broadly about what an ideal candidate truly needs to contribute on a long-term basis – i.e. a ‘strategic fit’ – companies can ensure they get the optimal return on their investment.
What does it mean to hire for ‘strategic fit’?
The aim for hiring for a ‘strategic fit’ is to align the hiring criteria and process with the demands of long-term goals and strategic objectives of the business. It requires the business to make a more courageous move, overcoming classic and predictable bias and preference for comfort, in favour of a potentially more disruptive, but potentially impactful hire.
Three reasons why hiring for culture fit doesn’t work
1. Hiring for culture fit is highly prone to bias
Rather than being a clear and well-defined measure, the definition of a company’s culture often consists of an incoherent set of descriptors including values, behaviours, personality traits and ‘gut instinct’.
The work on behavioural economics by the likes of Kahneman and Tversky has found that decision-making is often far more emotional than logical, often without us realising it. In the absence of indisputable criteria to help objectivise thinking, the risk of making decisions based on subconscious feelings will prevail. One example of this is impression management. This is the conscious or subconscious process by which individuals control or influence the perceptions others have of them; they deliberately present themselves in a favourable light.
2. A homogenous culture leads to stagnation
A homogenous culture may feel safe and comfortable, but it can result in recycling the same skillset and mindset, limiting growth. In today’s fast-paced world, this can prevent the progress needed to adapt and evolve to remain competitive.
Psychological studies have found that established groups are able to innovate and temporarily introduce improved working practices but often struggle to adopt them long term. New entrants to the group adopt effective practices more readily, but over time will be influenced by the majority group practice – even if they are inefficient and less effective.
Only when new members were introduced in sufficient numbers did the study find that improved practices were adopted, retained and developed further.
In summary, hiring for cultural fit can, over time, create a stagnated culture that lacks agility.
In a study cited in Harvard Business Review, adaptability (specifically cultural adaptability) was the most important skill for success. “Employees who could quickly adapt to cultural norms as they changed over time were more successful than employees who exhibited high cultural fit when first hired.”
3. ‘Culture fit’ does not mean high performance
Recent studies have struggled to confirm a strong relationship between culture fit and job performance. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic recently wrote in Forbes, that “…a large proportion of high performing employees don’t identify or fit in with the culture, whereas a large number of low performing employees may have strong emotional, and spiritual attachment to the culture, but perform rather poorly.” It also found no strong correlation between culture fit and employee engagement, with culture fit being far more related to how people rate their boss, career progression satisfaction and a healthy personality profile.
Moreover, the factors that drive engagement (the degree of vigor, dedication and absorption you experience at work) are mostly unrelated to culture fit.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Journalist, Forbes
Senior hires bring their own strategic opportunity
Appointing new senior leaders is a complex task with a range of interplaying factors that need to be informed by strong scientific data. Recruiting for strategic fit, whilst right for a business, can mean cultural dissonance at times, and if not foreseen and managed can lead to miscommunication or frustration.
This can be managed with a search methodology which includes:
– Strong up front enquiry to surface what’s really required.
– Rigorous profiling against agreed attributes.
– A robust advisory process designed to support clients to take more informed and confident decisions around critical hires.
In conclusion, our unequivocal advice to boards, senior leaders, and businesses is to move past the narrow focus on cultural fit and leverage the recruitment process as a strategic advantage.
Our value as business psychologists is to challenge leaders and businesses to move past the need for ‘cultural fit’ and think more broadly about what the business needs from the hire to achieve its strategic objectives. If you’d like to find out more about our leadership advisory services and how they can be tailored to fit your business or how our team of business psychologists can best partner with you, contact Jana Botha at [email protected].
