Culture fit, culture add, culture what? Welcome to this episode of the Culture & Inclusion podcast. What is this all about? You may have heard about these terms of culture fit and culture add when it comes to hiring new people. How you should, or shouldn’t hire for culture fit or culture add and so on.

I want to give you my take on this subject. Hiring for culture fit, for culture add, none of those, something else? I’ll give you my points of view, and I insist on the plural, and then you can decide what you want to hire for.

Let’s take culture fit. Culture fit is seen as hiring more of the same. This happens when for instance you rely on your network when hiring, because most people in your network are just like you! It happened when you think you need to hire people coming from certain schools or universities or having a certain degree. These people will be more similar because they have experienced the same culture.

Now, this is not the best if you are a homogeneous group because you will keep on getting people from that same homogeneous background. It is not the best either if your culture for instance is totally results driven, however the results are achieved. You keep on hiring results driven people who will see their quarterly targets as more important than their people, their team.

Now, in contrast, let’s say that your workplace is diverse, inclusive, innovative and anything positive you can associate to a culture. Then, you would want more of that, wouldn’t you? In that case, culture fit doesn’t seem so bad.

Shall we turn to culture add now? As it suggests, hiring new people is about adding to the existing culture. This is a great approach when you have identified a gap in your organisation. It is the way to go when you decide you need people with different experiences than what you already have, people from different backgrounds that who you already have, when you want to bring different ideas and expertise to your organisation.

However, if you are already not sure what your culture is actually, if you have let in people whom you’d rather not have in the organisation, then adding to an already suboptimal situation will not help.