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I wrote about why we got rid of cultural fit interview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#

I wrote about why we got rid of cultural fit interview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851060#9853911 a little over a year ago. The short answer was that we couldn't find a single thing that this interview helped with. And since then I have yet to hear anyone give a reasonable answer as to what a cultural fit interview provides. I mean by the time you are ready to hire someone, they've met the team and the team has already approved. We've already given them the hard sell on why they should work for us, infact this is what I spend half our initial phone screen doing, just selling the company. Almost all cultural fit interviews seem to be a form of asking: "Can we figure out if this person will dedicate all their waking hours to our company", and that's just really sad.

jmcdiesel 10y ago
The "culture fit" shouldnt be an interview all its own, its should be something that every person they speak to considers. Speaking only technically will give you that person's tech skills... that person's non-tech skills and nuances will actually have a huge effect on their performance and that of those they work closely with. Something powerful comes out of that - you learn intuitively what a person's true priorities are, and they do the same. You get a "feeling" about them and how they will incorporate into the team. those are just as important
techcode 10y ago
I've recently switched into doing "fit interviews", partially because it started to feel repetitive after 5 years (estimated 700-1000 candidates) of doing technical interviews. For us fit interviews make sense enough that we started doing them for every candidate, instead of just for ones that passed the technical parts, and I'll try to explain ... Maybe you can see something that could be useful for you. There's ~1000 people in our IT (and we are hiring - poke me if your interested), 50+ different nationalities, 95% of us are expats, we mostly do Perl code on BackEnd, expect everyone to have good commercial awareness (put ideas on backlog, push back on ProductOwner ...etc) and overall try to have the least bureaucracy/processes as possible. You can write code, push and roll it out into production within 30ish minutes - with no stamp/approval required (though on call sysadmin will ask you why are you doing it at 6am on a Sunday). IMHO quite an interesting setup for being majority part of publicly traded group (Nasdaq: PCLN). Most often you're not interviewed by people you'll work with (interviewers are not from same team). Fit interviewers focus/check commercial sense/awareness, motivation, flexibility regarding approaching things like tools and technology (we don't introduce new technology unless you can make a good commercial argument for it), follow up on anything raised by recruiters and technical interviewers, and also answer candidates questions. Indeed most of reasons we would not hire someone are noticed in other parts of interview as well. Besides being the ones who answer the most questions to candidates (besides recruitment) - fit interviews tend to be helpful for cases where everyone else is on the fence. If someone aced the tech parts - it's extremely rare fit interview is so bad we don't make an offer. BTW - everything mentioned is my personal interpretation ... If anyone has specific questions I'll try to answer them.

jmcdiesel 10y ago

The "culture fit" shouldnt be an interview all its own, its should be something that every person they speak to considers. Speaking only technically will give you that person's tech skills... that person's non-tech skills and nuances will actually have a huge effect on their performance and that of those they work closely with. Something powerful comes out of that - you learn intuitively what a person's true priorities are, and they do the same. You get a "feeling" about them and how they will incorporate into the team. those are just as important

techcode 10y ago

I've recently switched into doing "fit interviews", partially because it started to feel repetitive after 5 years (estimated 700-1000 candidates) of doing technical interviews. For us fit interviews make sense enough that we started doing them for every candidate, instead of just for ones that passed the technical parts, and I'll try to explain ... Maybe you can see something that could be useful for you. There's ~1000 people in our IT (and we are hiring - poke me if your interested), 50+ different nationalities, 95% of us are expats, we mostly do Perl code on BackEnd, expect everyone to have good commercial awareness (put ideas on backlog, push back on ProductOwner ...etc) and overall try to have the least bureaucracy/processes as possible. You can write code, push and roll it out into production within 30ish minutes - with no stamp/approval required (though on call sysadmin will ask you why are you doing it at 6am on a Sunday). IMHO quite an interesting setup for being majority part of publicly traded group (Nasdaq: PCLN). Most often you're not interviewed by people you'll work with (interviewers are not from same team). Fit interviewers focus/check commercial sense/awareness, motivation, flexibility regarding approaching things like tools and technology (we don't introduce new technology unless you can make a good commercial argument for it), follow up on anything raised by recruiters and technical interviewers, and also answer candidates questions. Indeed most of reasons we would not hire someone are noticed in other parts of interview as well. Besides being the ones who answer the most questions to candidates (besides recruitment) - fit interviews tend to be helpful for cases where everyone else is on the fence. If someone aced the tech parts - it's extremely rare fit interview is so bad we don't make an offer. BTW - everything mentioned is my personal interpretation ... If anyone has specific questions I'll try to answer them.