First, we need to understand what culture fit is. We see culture fit as the alignment of the prospective employee’s wants, core values, normative behaviours, fundamental needs, attitudes, and goals – with the company. This means that there is congruency in values, behaviours, attitudes and goals between both parties.
Think of it like this, when you bring someone into your team, you want that person to be a long-lasting, value-adding part of your work-family.
These people need to share (or have similar) values and goals so that they work well with your existing team. While it is easy to teach a skill, it can be hard to encourage someone to align with a core value, that they may not value.
Forbes summarises this well; “It’s important to remember where diversity fits into this equation. Don’t risk overlooking different cultures and lifestyles and backgrounds”.
On the surface of things, a father of three might not fit what you think is the “culture” of your young, single team who are willing to work late into the evening — but he likely brings some of the best historical knowledge of where the industry has been or a better sense of what customers actually want.
Managers should regularly ask HR to review their culture fit questions (and decisions) to ensure they are not accidentally building a team of people who all think, look and act the exact same way.
If you don’t review this regularly, you’ll run the risk of building a team that suffers the negative effects of groupthink and lack of cognitive diversity.
You want your people to be united by your company’s shared mission. You can leverage cognitive diversity and varying backgrounds to help your team to actually achieve it — tackling problems in new ways, thinking outside the box and ultimately bringing your culture to life.