What is Culture Fit?

Cultural Fit is defined as the individual’s attitudes, values and beliefs being in line with the core values and culture of an organization.

So what happens if you are from a different race, religion, ethnicity and background than the majority of the culture of the org?

Cultural Fit can counteract diversity and remove inclusiveness. Cultural Fit and a mismatch go hand in hand. The fewer similarities between applicants and employers in what drives them, the greater the risk of a mismatch where a candidate will leave the organization within 18 months. This really opens the door and contributes to culture bias.

Cultural bias is the phenomenon of interpreting and judging phenomena by standards inherent to one's own culture. Cultural bias occurs when people of a culture make assumptions about conventions, including conventions of language, notation, proof and evidence. They are then accused of mistaking these assumptions for laws of logic or nature. Numerous such biases exist, concerning cultural norms for color, mate selection, concepts of justice, linguistic and logical validity, the acceptability of evidence, and taboos.

A positive Cultural Fit improves the self-esteem of employees and makes them feel more competent, motivated and increases the desire of improving themselves and their work. Future expectations, ambitions and behavior also play an important role in being a good Cultural Fit. The Cultural Fit itself is strongly dependent on the employer brand or, in other words, the practiced culture of an organization.

What most people really mean when they say someone is a good fit culturally is that he or she is someone they’d like to have a beer with. But people with all sorts of personalities can be great at the job you need done. This misguided hiring strategy can also contribute to a company’s lack of diversity, since very often the people we enjoy hanging out with have backgrounds much like our own.

Culture fit has been used completely wrong in order to eliminate highly qualified candidates from the hiring process because they don’t “look” like the right fit based on a very limited, narrow and biased set of criteria. We need diversity of thought, training, education, background and talent.

Every company should aim to hire objectively seeking out the highest value that they can achieve from candidates’ mainly their talent as opposed to the culture they want to mold them into. We need to cancel Company Culture Fit and Culture Bias to re-frame a more progressive hiring model process to simply find a great Talent Fit!