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I feel like articles like this don’t actually say much. “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. The author basically says “don’t just hire people yo

I feel like articles like this don’t actually say much. “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges...which is culture fit. If your culture is “we hire people not who we like to drink beer with but those who solve problems” well then that’s culture fit isn’t it? Obviously every company is going to hire for cultural fit. Every company has values that they build around to create successful teams. I would never hire anyone that I didn’t think fit in with our team...why would I do that?Some companies value different things than others. So don’t go around saying “we don’t do culture fit”, yes you do, you just define culture fit differently than other businesses because that’s your “culture”.

michaelt 8y ago
Although you could argue that everything is culture and hence testing for anything is testing for cultural fit, that would be an unusually expansive definition of "culture fit" - so much so as to make it meaningless.
goalieca 8y ago
If you only hire people like you, then you have no diversity. Not having any diversity leads to a company that is less robust. You need dissenting ideas and different personalities to really find the best path forward. Monocultures are a good way to burn out fast.
wgerard 8y ago
> I would never hire anyone that I didn’t think fit in with our team...why would I do that? Because you might benefit from having someone with a different perspective in a professional environment. An older parent might not "fit in" with a team of 22 year-old fresh grads, but still provide valuable experience and perspective in a way that an additional 22 year-old might not. You can probably extrapolate how this might also affect women and minorities. Sure, in an ideal world "fit in" means simply "can coexist peacefully with", but in practice it can end up being a dog-whistle phrase (very similarly to "culture fit", which the article alludes to).
- tensor 8y ago
  Frankly, most of the article was using dog-whistle phrases anyways. They seem to be advocating to hire based on random traits you dream actually mean something, rather than any sort of principled process using data. Yelling "dog-whistle" and redefining the goal posts whenever anyone comments isn't constructive. I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values, not that they have the same perspective. Where I work, on some teams we explicitly try to hire people with different perspectives, but they still need to "fit" with our company values. And they still need to work with others without causing disruption.
  - wgerard 8y ago
    > I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values Ah, but there's the dog-whistle-rub: What are the company values? My guess is that they're sufficiently vague, like "works well with others", or "communicates effectively". Sometimes they're not even that opaque, like "work hard, play hard" (I've seen that one repeatedly). Those values are then often used to discredit people based on, frankly, illegal factors like age/race/gender. A friend once shared a story with me from a company they were at where every single woman they interviewed for an open developer position was rejected after the in-person interview because they were "too quiet and wouldn't be a good communicator". The company was otherwise fairly progressive all things considered (I was shocked to hear the name of the company, at least), but biases like these crop up in really unexpected and subtle ways. That's an anecdote obviously and not data, and of course maybe they just got all the quiet people by random chance. But I hope you see how vague criteria like "culture fit" do end up actually being dog-whistles sometimes.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      About this story--was it that they prejudiced all the women they interviewed as quiet, or did they just happen to interview a bunch of women who happened to be quiet because that's what our culture expects of women? I can't imagine Margaret Thatcher ever being called "too quiet and not a good communicator", but there were also a lot of other bad things people said about her. And yeah, if they interviewed a loud, well-spoken woman, and then rejected her because she was too "aggressive", that would definitely hint at bias to me. How do you solve that problem, as an employer? If you're an assertive workplace and you don't want to hire quiet, passive people, do you hire less assertive women anyway and then train them to be more assertive? I can see some logic around that, but you have to actually dig in and reason your way to that idea, and then you have to test it, and if it turns out not working out, then what? These are some hard problems, and assuming bad faith isn't the be-all end-all of talking about it.
ghaff 8y ago
It's actually a pretty good article by someone with a lot of experience in the area. >The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges Those seem pretty different. One is someone I click with at a personal level. The other is someone who can do the sort of work the business needs. I've worked with plenty of people who I didn't especially like but who were clearly good at their jobs. Sure, at some level, there are elements of culture in whether you're a process-driven organization, a let-the-best-idea win, etc. But the standard "not cultural fit" is more code for you're too old, too quiet, don't want to hang with the guys after work...
jimbokun 8y ago
Peter Thiel refused to hire someone who liked to play "hoops": "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. " http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-... You seem to assume everyone agrees that making hiring decisions on factors with zero relevance to doing the work doesn't make sense. Sadly that's not the case.
- wolco 8y ago
  By hoops do you mean basketball?
  - Buldak 8y ago
    I can imagine Thiel being perturbed by that verbiage.
    - raarts 8y ago
      I don't understand. Please enlighten me?
    - wolco 8y ago
      Ah so using the term hoops disqualified him. I can't say I disagree with the decision.
      - jimbokun 8y ago
        He wasn't hiring for an NBA franchise, so what the hell does someone's free time hobbies have to do with the hiring decision?
        wolco 8y ago
        Basketball in someone's free time isn't the issue. Using the term hoops vs basketball is. This can show major cultural differences. Perhap the gap was too wide for Peter.
aero142 8y ago
I feel like rhetorical analysis should be a more common school topic and area of academic work. I want to spend more time talking about what a productive discussion looks like and what actually counts as evidence. You are describing a difference of definition. The solution is to define your terms better. When we agree on definitions, we can more on to discussing what our core disagreement is and people should be able to recognize what counts as evidence for that. I think this is well worn territory but seems culturally lost today.
- jaggederest 8y ago
  Agreed. I feel it missing myself a lot when I'm communicating with people - I will often realize in retrospect that the problem was the definition of terms, not the facts at hand or opinions of the participants. It's galling, and I wish there were a better way to learn such skills.
kanox 8y ago
> “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. People has such widely varying definitions of "culture fit" that "hire for culture fit" doesn't mean anything either.

michaelt 8y ago

Although you could argue that everything is culture and hence testing for anything is testing for cultural fit, that would be an unusually expansive definition of "culture fit" - so much so as to make it meaningless.

goalieca 8y ago

If you only hire people like you, then you have no diversity. Not having any diversity leads to a company that is less robust. You need dissenting ideas and different personalities to really find the best path forward. Monocultures are a good way to burn out fast.

wgerard 8y ago

> I would never hire anyone that I didn’t think fit in with our team...why would I do that? Because you might benefit from having someone with a different perspective in a professional environment. An older parent might not "fit in" with a team of 22 year-old fresh grads, but still provide valuable experience and perspective in a way that an additional 22 year-old might not. You can probably extrapolate how this might also affect women and minorities. Sure, in an ideal world "fit in" means simply "can coexist peacefully with", but in practice it can end up being a dog-whistle phrase (very similarly to "culture fit", which the article alludes to).

tensor 8y ago
Frankly, most of the article was using dog-whistle phrases anyways. They seem to be advocating to hire based on random traits you dream actually mean something, rather than any sort of principled process using data. Yelling "dog-whistle" and redefining the goal posts whenever anyone comments isn't constructive. I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values, not that they have the same perspective. Where I work, on some teams we explicitly try to hire people with different perspectives, but they still need to "fit" with our company values. And they still need to work with others without causing disruption.
- wgerard 8y ago
  > I suspect that most people use "culture fit" to mean people that share company values Ah, but there's the dog-whistle-rub: What are the company values? My guess is that they're sufficiently vague, like "works well with others", or "communicates effectively". Sometimes they're not even that opaque, like "work hard, play hard" (I've seen that one repeatedly). Those values are then often used to discredit people based on, frankly, illegal factors like age/race/gender. A friend once shared a story with me from a company they were at where every single woman they interviewed for an open developer position was rejected after the in-person interview because they were "too quiet and wouldn't be a good communicator". The company was otherwise fairly progressive all things considered (I was shocked to hear the name of the company, at least), but biases like these crop up in really unexpected and subtle ways. That's an anecdote obviously and not data, and of course maybe they just got all the quiet people by random chance. But I hope you see how vague criteria like "culture fit" do end up actually being dog-whistles sometimes.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    About this story--was it that they prejudiced all the women they interviewed as quiet, or did they just happen to interview a bunch of women who happened to be quiet because that's what our culture expects of women? I can't imagine Margaret Thatcher ever being called "too quiet and not a good communicator", but there were also a lot of other bad things people said about her. And yeah, if they interviewed a loud, well-spoken woman, and then rejected her because she was too "aggressive", that would definitely hint at bias to me. How do you solve that problem, as an employer? If you're an assertive workplace and you don't want to hire quiet, passive people, do you hire less assertive women anyway and then train them to be more assertive? I can see some logic around that, but you have to actually dig in and reason your way to that idea, and then you have to test it, and if it turns out not working out, then what? These are some hard problems, and assuming bad faith isn't the be-all end-all of talking about it.

ghaff 8y ago

It's actually a pretty good article by someone with a lot of experience in the area. >The author basically says “don’t just hire people you’d want to have a beer with” and then goes on to say that they do hire for cultural fit by looking at their ability to solve problems and overcome challenges Those seem pretty different. One is someone I click with at a personal level. The other is someone who can do the sort of work the business needs. I've worked with plenty of people who I didn't especially like but who were clearly good at their jobs. Sure, at some level, there are elements of culture in whether you're a process-driven organization, a let-the-best-idea win, etc. But the standard "not cultural fit" is more code for you're too old, too quiet, don't want to hang with the guys after work...

jimbokun 8y ago

Peter Thiel refused to hire someone who liked to play "hoops": "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. " http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-... You seem to assume everyone agrees that making hiring decisions on factors with zero relevance to doing the work doesn't make sense. Sadly that's not the case.

wolco 8y ago
By hoops do you mean basketball?
- Buldak 8y ago
  I can imagine Thiel being perturbed by that verbiage.
  - raarts 8y ago
    I don't understand. Please enlighten me?
  - wolco 8y ago
    Ah so using the term hoops disqualified him. I can't say I disagree with the decision.
    - jimbokun 8y ago
      He wasn't hiring for an NBA franchise, so what the hell does someone's free time hobbies have to do with the hiring decision?
      - wolco 8y ago
        Basketball in someone's free time isn't the issue. Using the term hoops vs basketball is. This can show major cultural differences. Perhap the gap was too wide for Peter.

aero142 8y ago

I feel like rhetorical analysis should be a more common school topic and area of academic work. I want to spend more time talking about what a productive discussion looks like and what actually counts as evidence. You are describing a difference of definition. The solution is to define your terms better. When we agree on definitions, we can more on to discussing what our core disagreement is and people should be able to recognize what counts as evidence for that. I think this is well worn territory but seems culturally lost today.

jaggederest 8y ago
Agreed. I feel it missing myself a lot when I'm communicating with people - I will often realize in retrospect that the problem was the definition of terms, not the facts at hand or opinions of the participants. It's galling, and I wish there were a better way to learn such skills.

kanox 8y ago

> “Don’t hire for culture fit” doesn’t mean anything. People has such widely varying definitions of "culture fit" that "hire for culture fit" doesn't mean anything either.