Culture Fit Vs Culture Add in Software Recruitment

Why Culture Add is the way to hire.

Culture Fit vs Culture Add

Often times in software recruitment we hear the word "culture fit" but is this really how we should be interviewing candidates and using this benchmark in interview questions to determine whether or not they are great for the company? In today's blog, we will explore this topic.

Firstly let's start with the difference, what is Culture fit and Culture add in software recruitment?

To make a clear distinction, first think of Culture Fit as a replica of the previous person you hired. Culture fit is all about finding people as similar to the current team as possible, or "fitting in" with the current culture. This leads to a lot of biases during the interview process.

One example might be: The candidate was really vibrant and chatty during the interviews - an extrovert which is a great culture fit as our team loves to go to events together after work. The problem with this model is that it often times disqualifies candidates who don't "fit" this model but could be great for the company's growth and health of the team.

Ultimately, if you hire people that a similar to you and this is a key factor in hiring them, you could be applying a similarity bias, where you have preferring individuals whom you see as similar to yourself in some way. According to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning psychologist, bias are part of "system 1", meaning automatic, unconscious decision making can lead to errors in judgement. The risk is that you could be creating an unfair recruitment process, and long-term, hurting the diversity of your start-up. According to Harvard Business Review, and other research, diversity improves your business.

Here is where Culture add comes in. Culture add focuses more on the ideas a person brings rather than a "current fit." Culture add lets interviewers have less bias during the interview process but also paves way for diversity and inclusion. This doesn't mean that culture add suggests forgetting the company values, it means hiring people with aligned company values, but different ideas.

For example, culture add allows for people to not necessarily come from similar schools, have the same degree or a degree, have the same taste in music of the team, it's all about having similar company values but different ideas, experiences, and perspectives which will allow for innovation and problem solving, but also open doors to diversity and people who don't necessarily fit the "status quo."

Diversity and Inclusion and Belonging is a topic in of itself and needs constant work as well as an open mind. We need to be aware of our unconscious biases in order to improve the current state of our hiring practices.

Culture add and Culture Fit are just two examples of how we can start.

If you are looking to revamp your interview process in order to build an inclusive process, get in touch hello@optimyze1.com or Book a Meeting