18 ms·

What Companies Mean by Culture Fit

183 points by Harj 8y ago

elvinyung 8y ago
I was at a talk by Emily Chang about her new book Brotopia, and she raised a really good question: why frame it in terms of culture fit, as if culture is something pristine to be preserved? Why not think of it as culture addition, that is, in terms of trying to assess how much one can bring to the table?
- mc32 8y ago
  I think because when we think about culture fit, what people can add is already in the equation. When a culture fit is used to DQ someone it’s because on balance they subtracted more than they added relative to other candidates.
  - elvinyung 8y ago
    I think that's only a post hoc rationalization -- the point being that culture "fit" is also very easy to hide behind for people who are attempting to preserve a perceived consistency. Obviously all of these are just mental abstractions, but I contend that one is easier to think about as someone who cares about diversity.
    - mc32 8y ago
      To me the whole culture fit is a circus and there to make people believe they are being virtuous, etc. It’s BS. That said, there is some value in sharing some important core principles. However, to me either someone can execute their responsibilities, or they can’t—but it’s dufficult to infer that from a pre-work interview. As it is non conforming cultural fit might be someone who doesn’t drink like a fish, or someone who needs to take care of family obligations after working hours, for example.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    Or, at least, the interviewers perceived that that would be the case. Perception might be out of phase with reality there -- members of sub-optimal cultures don't necessarily realize they have a problem. (Then, I suppose, there's the further question of whether it's even possible to add to a culture that doesn't want to be added to.)
- tvanantwerp 8y ago
  If a person can add to a culture, then a person could also subtract from a culture. Getting the wrong people on the bus can be very damaging to a company. This is not to say that companies always do a good job at selecting people for addition rather than subtraction. Any place that could be deemed a "brotopia" is likely bad at building positive culture--I know I wouldn't want to work there. But still, different people will have different effects, some of them being net positive and others net negative. And what counts as positive or negative will vary a bit from org to org. If you can call culture fit a "culture addition", a lack of culture fit may be a case of "culture subtraction".
  - anon743987 8y ago
    I moved from "brotopia" to "non-brotopia" and I felt that it was a step down culturally.
    - elvinyung 8y ago
      Why?
      - hashfunktion 8y ago
        Most likely because he is a brogrammer. Brogrammers like to work with other brogrammers.
        sievebrain 8y ago
        And what does the word "brotopia" and "brogrammer" even mean? Is there anything to these terms except feminists being sexist and insulting?
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Because you don't add to a team which is highly dynamic by adding a person who expects a straightforward top-down decision-making process, and the same is the case in the reverse situation. This is not about pristine or not, but simply about the average. You do add to a team of programmers by adding a marketing person, salesperson, technical support or test person.
  - watwut 8y ago
    If that highly dynamic team is disorganized, you do add by adding more organized people - despite there being some conflicts as a result.
- longerthoughts 8y ago
  Totally agree. However, I will say anecdotally as a people manager that great additions to a team tend to bring new ideas and perspectives while simultaneously having something (values, perspectives, etc.) that anchors them to the existing group. If somebody deviates too far from the existing team it tends to cross a threshold from productive disruption to toxic conflict. I kind of think of this in the context of material properties and teams having their own stiffness and strength. The higher the strength, the harder it is for imposed forces (i.e. challenging new perspectives and personalities) to cause team failure. The higher the stiffness, the more resistant to changing form under imposed forces. I assume high strength is universally preferred, but stiffness is a little more complicated; a high stiffness team ensures consistency but is difficult to alter and improve upon, whereas low stiffness enhances your ability to reshape and broaden team culture but also leaves it more sensitive to changes.
- pkamb 8y ago
  Because we're already the Best Place To Work and we only hire The Best People, why would we possibly want to change?
tyingq 8y ago
Interesting topic, but... "Among the 300 companies I spoke to, only 20% told me they engaged in screening for specific traits beyond soft skills." Not convinced self disclosure is the best way to determine what they actually screen for.
- ammon 8y ago
  The conversations involved me asking them to talk through the details of their interview process and decision-making. I think there were good incentives for companies be honest (given the context of us matching engineers with them). I did the classification into types of screening after, based on my notes.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    It’s still hard to know what this means. For example, all the senior engineers I currently work with are great at telling a story about how they look to hire based on talent, self-awareness, critical thinking, and many soft skills, and that the technical particulars are only incidental guideposts. Then they proceed to ask candidates to derive a card shuffling algorithm on a whiteboard in 30 minutes and fail them from the interview if the running time complexity would be too high or if they can’t mathematically prove the result would be a uniform draw from the space of permutations of the cards. Whatever story they tell you, it’s not about whether they are lying or not, it’s about the extreme myopia in tech where these people actually believe they are sleuthing out the inner talents and dispositions of candidates when they are obviously doing nothing but berating candidates with parochial, uninformative trivia.
    - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
      > For example, all the senior engineers I may be wrong, but it sounds like you're using hyperbole in two ways here: (a) you make a statement about all the senior engineers you know, and (b) that statement makes a rather extreme claim about how they evaluate candidates. I think using hyperbole is a mistake in this conversation because we're interested specifically in how common and how intense these phenomena are. (I don't mean to single you out. This thought has also occurred to me when reading other online discussions lately.)
ska 8y ago
In my experience "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in way I am comfortable with" or less often "What an asshole". I don't think I've ever been part of a conversation about "cultural fit" that wasn't swimming in bullshit, or at least wading in it.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  At one shop, I think it was more of a question of, "Will this person work 70 hours a week as salary exempt." If you have a toxic manager asking these questions, you get employees who will work long hours to fix bad planning decisions. If that manager makes the wrong call, they get an employee who refuses to week over 45 hours a week and they are usually let go so other people don't get the same idea.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  > "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in way I am comfortable with" Either that or "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't say why because it would be against the law." "Culture fit" has mostly become a loophole for anti-discrimination laws.
  - tbrownaw 8y ago
    "Culture fit" has mostly become a loophole for anti-discrimination laws. Is this just gut feel, or based on actual data? Because it sounds contrary to the survey results described in the article.
    - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
      There is no untainted data in the subject. Any company that finds itself systemically rejecting protected classes of people through the "culture fit" label is asking for a lawsuit if they made it known to anyone. This is generally a problem with discrimination cases, it is extremely rare to find a real "smoking gun", usually it's just the end result that looks abnormal
ammon 8y ago
An interesting point that I ended up cutting from the blog post is that companies also use culture as a selling point to convince candidates to join. We have seen this work (convince a candidate to take an offer). However, most companies underestimate how similar their culture pitch is to other pitches candidates hear. I think these pitches are less effective than most companies think they are.
- theorique 8y ago
  Culture: "we have a billiards table and like craft beer. YOU SIMPLY CANNOT FIND ANOTHER STARTUP LIKE US!" /sarcasm
  - mikro2nd 8y ago
    Interviewee: That's good. I BREW craft beer. /gotcha
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      In that case, the interviewee is eliminated for failing to recognize the sarcasm.
DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
> A company is its employees. This is a bit nit-picky, but I find it distracting when an article leads with a statement that strikes me as grossly inaccurate. Because if the rest of the article hinges on the accuracy of that opening statement, I'm likely to regret having spent time reading the article. Clarification: The reason I'm skeptical of that particular opening statement is AFAIK U.S. corporations can have assets, liabilities, etc. that are very different than simply the sum of their employees. For example, I would gladly accept the parts of Apple that aren't employees: its bank accounts, patent portfolio, etc.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I thought the same thing. A company is also its buildings, equipment, things that can be liquidated, it's founders, it's principal investors, etc..
  - philwelch 8y ago
    A company whose value lies solely or predominantly in its tangible or liquefiable assets is a company that an efficient market will soon liquify, and thus ceases to be a company.
- acheron 8y ago
  "I've been saying for years that employees are our most valuable asset. It turns out that I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset. Employees are ninth." -Dilbert's PHB
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
harryh 8y ago
I'm pretty suspicious about most conversations about culture fit: I think they are more smoke than fire. Especially in technology, where it's a seller's market for labor I don't think a lot of companies are actually screening on this criterion. Do they think you are smart and can do the work? Then companies are going to want to hire you with the possible exception of if they think you are a huge asshole or complete weirdo. I don't think anyone cares all that much beyond that.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Do they think you are smart and can do the work? Then companies are going to want to hire you with the possible exception of if they think you are a huge asshole or complete weirdo. "Culture fit" is the justification for who they see as problematic, starting a bit short of being a "huge asshole or complete weirdo." I don't think anyone cares all that much beyond that. We know that such companies can be suffused with groupthink, to the point of mass hysteria and virulent hate. It's documented in public at this point.
- theorique 8y ago
  In my experience, culture fit is exactly that - a nice way of saying that the candidate was "a huge asshole or complete weirdo." It's shorthand for "I think they could probably do the work, but I don't think that I/we could actually stand working with this particular candidate".
  - harryh 8y ago
    Ya. Are you a sports loving bro? I don't care. Are you an arty hipster? I don't care. Are you a birkenstock wearing vegan nature lover? I don't care. Do you yell at people when you get upset over minor disagreements? Well that's gonna be a problem....
    - seppin 8y ago
      Well you covered every possible person one can meet in SF..
    - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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_audakel 8y ago
> Obviously, screening for specific personality traits has not kept Bridgewater or Stripe from succeeding. Uber, however, might be a different story. I am going to argue that personality trait screening may have harmed Uber. I agree there has been turmoil that has been detrimental to uber. But maybe the fact they specifically looked for hard core, "won't take no for an answer" is the reason they reached massive market / valuation they did. Lyft choose the "friendly" route and didn't get anything close to Uber size/valuation. I'm not saying this is the best strategy/ always works, but you are saying you consider stripe successful basically because they have not had turmoil/bad press, despite the fact they are a fraction of the value of Uber. Tldr: you probably NEED aggressive, won't take no, type of ppl to grow to a Uber size as quickly as they did.
mikeleeorg 8y ago
I once fell into the position of having to hire for a fast-growing new team at a large corporation. We didn't have a manager yet, so our department's VP trusted me to make hiring decisions. I made the first 20-ish hires, then helped out with 20 more. When we eventually got a director and other managers who were peers to me, I held the informal distinction of being able to make good hiring calls. Many of my hires rose quickly in the company, earned strong performance reviews, and even won awards at the company. Eventually, I become a middle manager and had to teach managers I supervised how to hire in a similar fashion. Relying on me to make a final call wasn't scalable. And that's when trouble began. A few bad hires leaked in. For the first time, our group experienced attrition. So I set about to try to systemize my recruiting process such that it was repeatable by others. That's when I had to codify our team "culture", which was something I used to help with my hiring decisions. There were times when I made a call to hire a candidate who seemed too junior for a role, because I felt there was a strong "culture fit." Of course, what I realized was, I was simply assessing for typical soft skills, as well as personality traits such as tenacity, initiative, quick study, etc. In other words, there was no magic. I didn't have some special gift for hiring. It was just a simple unspoken template in my head. And it wasn't exactly "culture" either, as much as it was a set of personality traits that every company looks for. I suppose what I came up with was basically a "structured culture fit screening assessment", to borrow the article's parlance. If you don't have something like this, I'd highly encourage that you look into it. Not only can it help minimize bias, but it can also give you a repeatable process for all of your company's hiring managers.
uhhhhhhh 8y ago
In my experience, "Culture fit" has always been the cover for "toxic" workplaces where sexism, bullying and worse run rampant. If everyone acts professional then chances are you'll figure out how to work together. If you're unable to act professional then chances are the new hire isn't the problem, you are.
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  The candidate can also be toxic and unprofessional, this is a two-way street. What if the company doesn't want to bring "sexism, bullying and worse" into the group?
  - 1337biz 8y ago
    Such an elegant response. Thanks you for that!
  - donbright 8y ago
    then wouldn't we would be able to correlate rates of lower toxic behavior, like harassment and conflict, with the practice of 'cultural fit'? like doing some kind of empirical study? ironically i would wager that the people who can pass a 'cultural fit' test with the highest score might actually be Sociopaths, since they are the world experts at being charming to complete and utter strangers.
    - BadassFractal 8y ago
      Note I'm not defending a "cultural fit test" here. I don't even know what that means, it's an amorphous concept with few specifics, everybody defines it how they want. My point is that from day 1 you have to protect your group from outsiders who are unprofessional, toxic, and will sink morale and productivity. How you do it is up to you, but the issue cannot be naively framed as "companies are bad and sexist, while pure, good-natured, kind human beings are rejected from positions they deserve unfairly". That's a nice fairy tale that falls apart once you yourself spend a few years hiring.
kgilpin 8y ago
I'm in agreement with other commenters here that "culture fit" usually feels like a euphemism for something else. I think what it's really about is explained here in the article: "A single toxic employee who is a bad fit for the existing culture can tank the morale and productivity of an entire team. " So, is there really more to "culture fit" than the No Asshole Rule (1)? If not, can we start calling it what it is: "asshole rejection screening". Then maybe we can use the word "culture fit" less (maybe even "culture" less), because requiring new employees to "fit a culture" is pretty lacking in concrete justification. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule
- cirgue 8y ago
  Here's a concrete example: how does someone ask a peer to do something for them? There are a bunch of different ways this can be done, and only a small percentage of them fall into 'asshole' territory, but if you ask ten people to define the 'asshole boundary', you will get ten different responses.
- longerthoughts 8y ago
  I'm on board with "asshole rejection screening" in place of "culture fit". Of course the flip-side of this is when a team of assholes rejects a non-asshole because they deem them incompatible, so perhaps we need to use the more general "asshole screening" for the sake of inclusiveness.
- grandmczeb 8y ago
  Having been a mediator for many peer/co-worker conflicts, I've come to believe that "true" assholes (in the sense of someone who is fundamentally mean and entitled) are way more rare than people admit. On the other hand, it's not rare at all that a person can be considered an asshole by one group but work well in another. A large part of culture fit is about minimizing these personality conflicts.
  - watwut 8y ago
    If too many people are in conflict with existing culture, then maybe the culture itself is a problem.
kthejoker2 8y ago
Outside of "exhibits basic social grace and custom", culture to me is: * Diversity of thought and multidisciplinary approach to problem solving * How you view teams, how you would organize a team you were going to be part of, what makes a good team * How you handle failure, defeat, and disappointment * How you handle difficult people and situations * Your communication style, especially for bad news * How you convince others to change * Your view on work life balance * Your attitude towards management and leadership styles * Your appetite for risk and entrepreneurship * Your dispute resolution tactics There may be others... In any case you can address most of these for senior hires with simple SBO questioning. For juniors you're probably best off just focusing on communication skills, working in teams, and challenging situations or failures.
seppin 8y ago
"I don't want to spend 8 hours a day with this person" is a perfectly good reason not to hire someone.
- sampleinajar 8y ago
  It is, though I'm not sure that scales appropriately into larger organizations.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Yes. On the other hand, "I don't want to hang with this person after work" or "we choose different ways to relax" are extremely poor reasons.
- ionforce 8y ago
  Do you maintain that stance if that sentiment is rooted in gender or race or sexuality (etc etc)?
  - jayalpha 8y ago
    My mind is still puzzled by this discussion and I will think deeply about it. But regarding your question: Yes, why not? I learned it the hard way that sometimes some kind of sentiment is good. :-)
    - astura 8y ago
      >why not? Because it's illegal?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dbt00 8y ago
I found the Uber comments interesting. As someone on the other side of the table from Uber recruiting, I always figured a huge part of their hiring problem is that it was obvious from the early stages that Uber was run by and populated by a huge percentage of assholes, and people who had the sensitivity to understand that and the desire and choices available to avoid doing so would. Thus, the asshole primacy was maintained.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  Agreed- I had a phone screen from Uber that turned me off from the company single handedly several years ago.
bjornlouser 8y ago
Good culture fit is when we ask an employee to do something and they do it. A bad fit is someone who occasionally says no. A toxic employee occasionally says no and explains why they won't.
- atomi 8y ago
  I've always thought being meek and obedient was part and parcel of working for someone else. But I think being a good culture fit is a bit more than that.
  - lovich 8y ago
    Being meek and obedient is part of working for someone else when you have no choice. If you can get a comparable job in a short time, then it's the employers who start needing to be more meek
  - adrianmonk 8y ago
    My theory is hire smart professionals, then treat them like they're smart and professional. They should be expected to have an opinion and allowed to express it. If you don't want any of your ideas challenged ever, then don't waste your money hiring a person with a brain. And if you hire someone with 10 years of experience, hopefully you can appreciate that they've learned something in that time that give them a perspective you want to hear. But, of course, after they've respectfully disagreed, they should also be ready to set aside their opinion and go along with whatever was decided. That comes with the professional part of smart and professional.
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    I'm working worth some folks now who want and appreciate severe critical feedback, and it's great.
- rleigh 8y ago
  Why do you consider it bad to say no? Do you not expect your employees to exhibit independent thought and act professionally? If someone was asked to do something which was seriously wrong, wouldn't you want them to call it out rather than be a yes man and silently let something bad happen? If they explain exactly what's wrong and why, isn't that simply being professional? Or do you just want obedient slaves?
WisNorCan 8y ago
Amazon stands out among the tech giants with the most distinctive behavioral values (LPs*). They are used for both recruiting, decision making and career advancements. Amazon provides a strong counter example to the thesis of this article. [1] https://www.amazon.jobs/principles https://www.amazon.jobs/principles
crazygringo 8y ago
> Uber, however, might be a different story... For years before this, they selected for aggressive employees, who wanted to be owners, not renters. For a company built on the sharing/renting economy, that's... ironic.
eplanit 8y ago
They mean "Bias Fit".
rmason 8y ago
My experience about 'culture fit' was that it was a code word for ageism. Sometimes they'd be even more direct if I pushed back. This wasn't at the end of a 45 minute interview, it was in the first five minutes after I'd already passed the technical review. Might not be true in every instance, but I absolutely cringe when I hear that phrase.
- gmmeyer 8y ago
  Don't forget about race.
  - draw_down 8y ago
    It’s really anything that doesn’t match the team’s (or individual interviewer’s) notion of what a good developer looks like. So it could be how you dress, how you talk, even if you are white and male and not over some age threshold. And I suspect much of that is not conscious, which of course makes it difficult to talk about and address.
    - JimboOmega 8y ago
      I got the job I have now while, for lack of a better term, being "visibly trans", the only person of my race on the team, and also well into my 30s. I don't think it'd be possible for me to look more different than I do from my teammates (especially how the team looked when I started - it's grown and become somewhat more diverse since) That said, I do worry about how my presentation will be perceived elsewhere, it comes time to move on.
      - draw_down 8y ago
        It’s not about looking the same necessarily, it’s about whether you fit the person/team’s image of a good developer, which sometimes can be very narrow. If the team is diverse that is less likely to be the case, of course. Also, people totally get discriminated against for being trans (though I’m glad to hear you didn’t). That seems indisputable to me, so I’m not sure what your point is unless you’re saying that it doesn’t always happen, which, sure it doesn’t.
golemiprague 8y ago
Culture fit is what people really feel inside but don't want to talk about because the current religion dictates that diversity is the best thing for a company. The thing is, for most tasks, homogenous and cohesive team is much more efficient and performant. It is easier for most people to work with people who are similiar to them, both culturally, racially, temperamentally, IQ level and anything else you can think about. Companies, like countries tend to disintegrate when they become too diverse. Sometimes, small doses of diversity are necessary for break throughs and creativity, but it is small doses, not the main way things suppose to work day by day.
- donbright 8y ago
  Every single sentence you wrote above is factually wrong, demonstrated not only by the study of the history of economics and society, but also empirically in something as simple as a genetic algorithm evolution inside a computer.
  - golemiprague 8y ago
    Show me any research about those subjects, especially the ones about diversity and I will show you 100 different parameters that the research didn't and can't control for. Also I will challenge you to reproduce those results and and I am willing to put my left arm on a bet that you won't be able to. On the other hand I can show you very homogenous and successful environments, first and foremost the silicon valley itself. Isn't the common complain is that there are too many cis white males there? So how come it is maybe the most successful part of the economy in the last 40 years or so? What about Japan and Korea? What about almost every sub genre in are and music which was developed usually by homogenous group? You bring me some theoretic algorithm in a computer, I show you huge entities of innovation and success in real life.
SonnyWortzik 8y ago
We joke a lot about that after I was hired as a middle aged coder... during interview Boss: "so do you think you can fit in this culture?" Me: "You mean, do I wear skinny jeans and drink kale smoothies? Probably not, but if you want your work done, does culture fit matter when you have a mile long back log?" Boss: "good point, so... How does your schedule look for next week?" it was all history from there.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Often companies actually do care more about optics than productivity. I’ve definitely worked in large, successful companies where wearing the skinny jeans and drinking the smoothie are vastly more important than your productivity most of the time. Another big, obvious manifestation of this is open-plan offices. “Does working in a noisy, open space that doesn’t actually save significant money relative to engineer salaries and lost productivity matter when you have a mile long back log?” Yes, as it turns out, displaying the optics of looking visually like a hip start-up stereotype does matter more than the mile long back log.
  - mgkimsal 8y ago
    If you're the person getting stuff done, while others aren't relative to your output, you make others look bad which certainly doesn't help you 'fit in' with the culture.
  - komodosquirrel 8y ago
    I see that in start-ups. Their workforce must look "fresh" and "cool", "Instagram ready". This supposedly brings money apparently bored with life Angel investors love to burn. In those companies your product is a lifestyle for investors, what you are actually making is secondary. If someone is talented, it is a worst place to be in.
  - meowface 8y ago
    But have you seen this sort of thing at a company that wasn't dysfunctional or unsuccessful?
- 8y ago
motohagiography 8y ago
Culture fit is a euphemism for shared values, and those are a mix of where strategy meets background. Trouble I have seen is that companies don't talk about those two things because they truly are the value proposition of the firm. Often this is not precisely clear. The real strategy of a company is necessarily hidden, but the direction it yields is something people can align to, knowingly or more often, not. Is the strategy to get acquired for IP or because they were positioned to execute in a growth market, or maybe to create or dominate a market? These are radically different, but you can tell by looking at a cap table and an office what their plan is. Do they need people to not ask questions, or do they need compelling visionaries? Maybe they need people to keep the ball in the air, engineers to optimize and scale big ideas, or new blood in an ossified institution. Those strategic outcomes define culture. When I hear people say, "culture eats strategy for breakfast," I always think, "yeah, without strategy, culture starves." As you can tell I'm a real hit at off sites.
deathanatos 8y ago
Huh. I reserve "culture fit" to mean "did the candidate make racist, sexist, or ageist remarks (or other such similar remarks about something absolutely unrelated to actual engineering)?" I've yet to not hire someone under this. (Though I have one person who I would not hire today, but I still do not know how I would have screened for them in the interview.) Seems like I'm the only one, though. The rest of the comments seem to indicate looking for something deeper.
mk89 8y ago
I think that hiring for culture fit is not the hardest thing to do - it's no different from hiring for technical skills. It just requires that you have some background in psychology so that you can easily spot someone who is lying. Of course, it doesn't mean that you need to have a master degree in psychology. You can learn, and here experience and gut feelings play a very important role, although as someone has said, there are interesting questions you can ask to tell the Rockstar from the team player. So yes, you can use normal questions plus gut feelings. For me more important than hiring the right people is how to retain the good ones and prevent assholes to prevail and destroy the nice atmosphere at work. Prevention is nothing if you don't act when the problem occurs. And eventually it will. I can't believe that companies like Amazon or Google with > 100000 employees only hire great people culturally fit. We are animals, and when put together there is always someone that wants to prevail. And there is always the culturally unfit that somehow sneaks in. The difference is how you tackle that. I have seen and been in companies where the action was literally doing nothing. You have to change to behave in a different way towards the asshole, in order to make your life easier. That's the answer. Lots of "Let's hire for good fit", but no "how to deal with aholes at work that disrupt your work environment". Ps. People should read the "no as*hole rule" book. A first good resource on how to deal with such people.
Suntracker 8y ago
The phrase "Culture Fit" has many shades and hues. Generally, the hiring manager and his/her team would take a call on "cultural aspect", which in principle should be a fair representation of the company culture. But on many occasions that may not be case. If a manager has a bias and certain prejudicial views, it becomes culture of the team/group. In that case, a "culture fit" aspect of interview is meaningless.
jdauriemma 8y ago
If your company culture is valuable to you, articulate the things that make it valuable and write them down. Make sure the criteria are specific and measurable, then apply them to the interview and evaluation process.

183 points by Harj 8y ago

I was at a talk by Emily Chang about her new book Brotopia, and she raised a really good question: why frame it in terms of culture fit, as if culture is something pristine to be preserved? Why not think of it as culture addition, that is, in terms of trying to assess how much one can bring to the table?

mc32 8y ago
I think because when we think about culture fit, what people can add is already in the equation. When a culture fit is used to DQ someone it’s because on balance they subtracted more than they added relative to other candidates.
- elvinyung 8y ago
  I think that's only a post hoc rationalization -- the point being that culture "fit" is also very easy to hide behind for people who are attempting to preserve a perceived consistency. Obviously all of these are just mental abstractions, but I contend that one is easier to think about as someone who cares about diversity.
  - mc32 8y ago
    To me the whole culture fit is a circus and there to make people believe they are being virtuous, etc. It’s BS. That said, there is some value in sharing some important core principles. However, to me either someone can execute their responsibilities, or they can’t—but it’s dufficult to infer that from a pre-work interview. As it is non conforming cultural fit might be someone who doesn’t drink like a fish, or someone who needs to take care of family obligations after working hours, for example.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Or, at least, the interviewers perceived that that would be the case. Perception might be out of phase with reality there -- members of sub-optimal cultures don't necessarily realize they have a problem. (Then, I suppose, there's the further question of whether it's even possible to add to a culture that doesn't want to be added to.)
tvanantwerp 8y ago
If a person can add to a culture, then a person could also subtract from a culture. Getting the wrong people on the bus can be very damaging to a company. This is not to say that companies always do a good job at selecting people for addition rather than subtraction. Any place that could be deemed a "brotopia" is likely bad at building positive culture--I know I wouldn't want to work there. But still, different people will have different effects, some of them being net positive and others net negative. And what counts as positive or negative will vary a bit from org to org. If you can call culture fit a "culture addition", a lack of culture fit may be a case of "culture subtraction".
- anon743987 8y ago
  I moved from "brotopia" to "non-brotopia" and I felt that it was a step down culturally.
  - elvinyung 8y ago
    Why?
    - hashfunktion 8y ago
      Most likely because he is a brogrammer. Brogrammers like to work with other brogrammers.
      - sievebrain 8y ago
        And what does the word "brotopia" and "brogrammer" even mean? Is there anything to these terms except feminists being sexist and insulting?
tomjen3 8y ago
Because you don't add to a team which is highly dynamic by adding a person who expects a straightforward top-down decision-making process, and the same is the case in the reverse situation. This is not about pristine or not, but simply about the average. You do add to a team of programmers by adding a marketing person, salesperson, technical support or test person.
- watwut 8y ago
  If that highly dynamic team is disorganized, you do add by adding more organized people - despite there being some conflicts as a result.
longerthoughts 8y ago
Totally agree. However, I will say anecdotally as a people manager that great additions to a team tend to bring new ideas and perspectives while simultaneously having something (values, perspectives, etc.) that anchors them to the existing group. If somebody deviates too far from the existing team it tends to cross a threshold from productive disruption to toxic conflict. I kind of think of this in the context of material properties and teams having their own stiffness and strength. The higher the strength, the harder it is for imposed forces (i.e. challenging new perspectives and personalities) to cause team failure. The higher the stiffness, the more resistant to changing form under imposed forces. I assume high strength is universally preferred, but stiffness is a little more complicated; a high stiffness team ensures consistency but is difficult to alter and improve upon, whereas low stiffness enhances your ability to reshape and broaden team culture but also leaves it more sensitive to changes.
pkamb 8y ago
Because we're already the Best Place To Work and we only hire The Best People, why would we possibly want to change?

tyingq 8y ago

Interesting topic, but... "Among the 300 companies I spoke to, only 20% told me they engaged in screening for specific traits beyond soft skills." Not convinced self disclosure is the best way to determine what they actually screen for.

ammon 8y ago
The conversations involved me asking them to talk through the details of their interview process and decision-making. I think there were good incentives for companies be honest (given the context of us matching engineers with them). I did the classification into types of screening after, based on my notes.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  It’s still hard to know what this means. For example, all the senior engineers I currently work with are great at telling a story about how they look to hire based on talent, self-awareness, critical thinking, and many soft skills, and that the technical particulars are only incidental guideposts. Then they proceed to ask candidates to derive a card shuffling algorithm on a whiteboard in 30 minutes and fail them from the interview if the running time complexity would be too high or if they can’t mathematically prove the result would be a uniform draw from the space of permutations of the cards. Whatever story they tell you, it’s not about whether they are lying or not, it’s about the extreme myopia in tech where these people actually believe they are sleuthing out the inner talents and dispositions of candidates when they are obviously doing nothing but berating candidates with parochial, uninformative trivia.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    > For example, all the senior engineers I may be wrong, but it sounds like you're using hyperbole in two ways here: (a) you make a statement about all the senior engineers you know, and (b) that statement makes a rather extreme claim about how they evaluate candidates. I think using hyperbole is a mistake in this conversation because we're interested specifically in how common and how intense these phenomena are. (I don't mean to single you out. This thought has also occurred to me when reading other online discussions lately.)

ska 8y ago

In my experience "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in way I am comfortable with" or less often "What an asshole". I don't think I've ever been part of a conversation about "cultural fit" that wasn't swimming in bullshit, or at least wading in it.

djsumdog 8y ago
At one shop, I think it was more of a question of, "Will this person work 70 hours a week as salary exempt." If you have a toxic manager asking these questions, you get employees who will work long hours to fix bad planning decisions. If that manager makes the wrong call, they get an employee who refuses to week over 45 hours a week and they are usually let go so other people don't get the same idea.
Analemma_ 8y ago
> "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in way I am comfortable with" Either that or "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't say why because it would be against the law." "Culture fit" has mostly become a loophole for anti-discrimination laws.
- tbrownaw 8y ago
  "Culture fit" has mostly become a loophole for anti-discrimination laws. Is this just gut feel, or based on actual data? Because it sounds contrary to the survey results described in the article.
  - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
    There is no untainted data in the subject. Any company that finds itself systemically rejecting protected classes of people through the "culture fit" label is asking for a lawsuit if they made it known to anyone. This is generally a problem with discrimination cases, it is extremely rare to find a real "smoking gun", usually it's just the end result that looks abnormal

ammon 8y ago

An interesting point that I ended up cutting from the blog post is that companies also use culture as a selling point to convince candidates to join. We have seen this work (convince a candidate to take an offer). However, most companies underestimate how similar their culture pitch is to other pitches candidates hear. I think these pitches are less effective than most companies think they are.

theorique 8y ago
Culture: "we have a billiards table and like craft beer. YOU SIMPLY CANNOT FIND ANOTHER STARTUP LIKE US!" /sarcasm
- mikro2nd 8y ago
  Interviewee: That's good. I BREW craft beer. /gotcha
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    In that case, the interviewee is eliminated for failing to recognize the sarcasm.

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago

> A company is its employees. This is a bit nit-picky, but I find it distracting when an article leads with a statement that strikes me as grossly inaccurate. Because if the rest of the article hinges on the accuracy of that opening statement, I'm likely to regret having spent time reading the article. Clarification: The reason I'm skeptical of that particular opening statement is AFAIK U.S. corporations can have assets, liabilities, etc. that are very different than simply the sum of their employees. For example, I would gladly accept the parts of Apple that aren't employees: its bank accounts, patent portfolio, etc.

djsumdog 8y ago
I thought the same thing. A company is also its buildings, equipment, things that can be liquidated, it's founders, it's principal investors, etc..
- philwelch 8y ago
  A company whose value lies solely or predominantly in its tangible or liquefiable assets is a company that an efficient market will soon liquify, and thus ceases to be a company.
acheron 8y ago
"I've been saying for years that employees are our most valuable asset. It turns out that I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset. Employees are ninth." -Dilbert's PHB
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harryh 8y ago

I'm pretty suspicious about most conversations about culture fit: I think they are more smoke than fire. Especially in technology, where it's a seller's market for labor I don't think a lot of companies are actually screening on this criterion. Do they think you are smart and can do the work? Then companies are going to want to hire you with the possible exception of if they think you are a huge asshole or complete weirdo. I don't think anyone cares all that much beyond that.

stcredzero 8y ago
Do they think you are smart and can do the work? Then companies are going to want to hire you with the possible exception of if they think you are a huge asshole or complete weirdo. "Culture fit" is the justification for who they see as problematic, starting a bit short of being a "huge asshole or complete weirdo." I don't think anyone cares all that much beyond that. We know that such companies can be suffused with groupthink, to the point of mass hysteria and virulent hate. It's documented in public at this point.
theorique 8y ago
In my experience, culture fit is exactly that - a nice way of saying that the candidate was "a huge asshole or complete weirdo." It's shorthand for "I think they could probably do the work, but I don't think that I/we could actually stand working with this particular candidate".
- harryh 8y ago
  Ya. Are you a sports loving bro? I don't care. Are you an arty hipster? I don't care. Are you a birkenstock wearing vegan nature lover? I don't care. Do you yell at people when you get upset over minor disagreements? Well that's gonna be a problem....
  - seppin 8y ago
    Well you covered every possible person one can meet in SF..
  - 8y ago

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_audakel 8y ago

> Obviously, screening for specific personality traits has not kept Bridgewater or Stripe from succeeding. Uber, however, might be a different story. I am going to argue that personality trait screening may have harmed Uber. I agree there has been turmoil that has been detrimental to uber. But maybe the fact they specifically looked for hard core, "won't take no for an answer" is the reason they reached massive market / valuation they did. Lyft choose the "friendly" route and didn't get anything close to Uber size/valuation. I'm not saying this is the best strategy/ always works, but you are saying you consider stripe successful basically because they have not had turmoil/bad press, despite the fact they are a fraction of the value of Uber. Tldr: you probably NEED aggressive, won't take no, type of ppl to grow to a Uber size as quickly as they did.

mikeleeorg 8y ago

I once fell into the position of having to hire for a fast-growing new team at a large corporation. We didn't have a manager yet, so our department's VP trusted me to make hiring decisions. I made the first 20-ish hires, then helped out with 20 more. When we eventually got a director and other managers who were peers to me, I held the informal distinction of being able to make good hiring calls. Many of my hires rose quickly in the company, earned strong performance reviews, and even won awards at the company. Eventually, I become a middle manager and had to teach managers I supervised how to hire in a similar fashion. Relying on me to make a final call wasn't scalable. And that's when trouble began. A few bad hires leaked in. For the first time, our group experienced attrition. So I set about to try to systemize my recruiting process such that it was repeatable by others. That's when I had to codify our team "culture", which was something I used to help with my hiring decisions. There were times when I made a call to hire a candidate who seemed too junior for a role, because I felt there was a strong "culture fit." Of course, what I realized was, I was simply assessing for typical soft skills, as well as personality traits such as tenacity, initiative, quick study, etc. In other words, there was no magic. I didn't have some special gift for hiring. It was just a simple unspoken template in my head. And it wasn't exactly "culture" either, as much as it was a set of personality traits that every company looks for. I suppose what I came up with was basically a "structured culture fit screening assessment", to borrow the article's parlance. If you don't have something like this, I'd highly encourage that you look into it. Not only can it help minimize bias, but it can also give you a repeatable process for all of your company's hiring managers.

uhhhhhhh 8y ago

In my experience, "Culture fit" has always been the cover for "toxic" workplaces where sexism, bullying and worse run rampant. If everyone acts professional then chances are you'll figure out how to work together. If you're unable to act professional then chances are the new hire isn't the problem, you are.

BadassFractal 8y ago
The candidate can also be toxic and unprofessional, this is a two-way street. What if the company doesn't want to bring "sexism, bullying and worse" into the group?
- 1337biz 8y ago
  Such an elegant response. Thanks you for that!
- donbright 8y ago
  then wouldn't we would be able to correlate rates of lower toxic behavior, like harassment and conflict, with the practice of 'cultural fit'? like doing some kind of empirical study? ironically i would wager that the people who can pass a 'cultural fit' test with the highest score might actually be Sociopaths, since they are the world experts at being charming to complete and utter strangers.
  - BadassFractal 8y ago
    Note I'm not defending a "cultural fit test" here. I don't even know what that means, it's an amorphous concept with few specifics, everybody defines it how they want. My point is that from day 1 you have to protect your group from outsiders who are unprofessional, toxic, and will sink morale and productivity. How you do it is up to you, but the issue cannot be naively framed as "companies are bad and sexist, while pure, good-natured, kind human beings are rejected from positions they deserve unfairly". That's a nice fairy tale that falls apart once you yourself spend a few years hiring.

kgilpin 8y ago

I'm in agreement with other commenters here that "culture fit" usually feels like a euphemism for something else. I think what it's really about is explained here in the article: "A single toxic employee who is a bad fit for the existing culture can tank the morale and productivity of an entire team. " So, is there really more to "culture fit" than the No Asshole Rule (1)? If not, can we start calling it what it is: "asshole rejection screening". Then maybe we can use the word "culture fit" less (maybe even "culture" less), because requiring new employees to "fit a culture" is pretty lacking in concrete justification. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule

cirgue 8y ago
Here's a concrete example: how does someone ask a peer to do something for them? There are a bunch of different ways this can be done, and only a small percentage of them fall into 'asshole' territory, but if you ask ten people to define the 'asshole boundary', you will get ten different responses.
longerthoughts 8y ago
I'm on board with "asshole rejection screening" in place of "culture fit". Of course the flip-side of this is when a team of assholes rejects a non-asshole because they deem them incompatible, so perhaps we need to use the more general "asshole screening" for the sake of inclusiveness.
grandmczeb 8y ago
Having been a mediator for many peer/co-worker conflicts, I've come to believe that "true" assholes (in the sense of someone who is fundamentally mean and entitled) are way more rare than people admit. On the other hand, it's not rare at all that a person can be considered an asshole by one group but work well in another. A large part of culture fit is about minimizing these personality conflicts.
- watwut 8y ago
  If too many people are in conflict with existing culture, then maybe the culture itself is a problem.

kthejoker2 8y ago

Outside of "exhibits basic social grace and custom", culture to me is: * Diversity of thought and multidisciplinary approach to problem solving * How you view teams, how you would organize a team you were going to be part of, what makes a good team * How you handle failure, defeat, and disappointment * How you handle difficult people and situations * Your communication style, especially for bad news * How you convince others to change * Your view on work life balance * Your attitude towards management and leadership styles * Your appetite for risk and entrepreneurship * Your dispute resolution tactics There may be others... In any case you can address most of these for senior hires with simple SBO questioning. For juniors you're probably best off just focusing on communication skills, working in teams, and challenging situations or failures.

seppin 8y ago

"I don't want to spend 8 hours a day with this person" is a perfectly good reason not to hire someone.

sampleinajar 8y ago
It is, though I'm not sure that scales appropriately into larger organizations.
cimmanom 8y ago
Yes. On the other hand, "I don't want to hang with this person after work" or "we choose different ways to relax" are extremely poor reasons.
ionforce 8y ago
Do you maintain that stance if that sentiment is rooted in gender or race or sexuality (etc etc)?
- jayalpha 8y ago
  My mind is still puzzled by this discussion and I will think deeply about it. But regarding your question: Yes, why not? I learned it the hard way that sometimes some kind of sentiment is good. :-)
  - astura 8y ago
    >why not? Because it's illegal?
deleted 8y ago
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dbt00 8y ago

I found the Uber comments interesting. As someone on the other side of the table from Uber recruiting, I always figured a huge part of their hiring problem is that it was obvious from the early stages that Uber was run by and populated by a huge percentage of assholes, and people who had the sensitivity to understand that and the desire and choices available to avoid doing so would. Thus, the asshole primacy was maintained.

mattnewton 8y ago
Agreed- I had a phone screen from Uber that turned me off from the company single handedly several years ago.

bjornlouser 8y ago

Good culture fit is when we ask an employee to do something and they do it. A bad fit is someone who occasionally says no. A toxic employee occasionally says no and explains why they won't.

atomi 8y ago
I've always thought being meek and obedient was part and parcel of working for someone else. But I think being a good culture fit is a bit more than that.
- lovich 8y ago
  Being meek and obedient is part of working for someone else when you have no choice. If you can get a comparable job in a short time, then it's the employers who start needing to be more meek
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  My theory is hire smart professionals, then treat them like they're smart and professional. They should be expected to have an opinion and allowed to express it. If you don't want any of your ideas challenged ever, then don't waste your money hiring a person with a brain. And if you hire someone with 10 years of experience, hopefully you can appreciate that they've learned something in that time that give them a perspective you want to hear. But, of course, after they've respectfully disagreed, they should also be ready to set aside their opinion and go along with whatever was decided. That comes with the professional part of smart and professional.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  I'm working worth some folks now who want and appreciate severe critical feedback, and it's great.
rleigh 8y ago
Why do you consider it bad to say no? Do you not expect your employees to exhibit independent thought and act professionally? If someone was asked to do something which was seriously wrong, wouldn't you want them to call it out rather than be a yes man and silently let something bad happen? If they explain exactly what's wrong and why, isn't that simply being professional? Or do you just want obedient slaves?

WisNorCan 8y ago

Amazon stands out among the tech giants with the most distinctive behavioral values (LPs*). They are used for both recruiting, decision making and career advancements. Amazon provides a strong counter example to the thesis of this article. [1] https://www.amazon.jobs/principles https://www.amazon.jobs/principles

crazygringo 8y ago

> Uber, however, might be a different story... For years before this, they selected for aggressive employees, who wanted to be owners, not renters. For a company built on the sharing/renting economy, that's... ironic.

eplanit 8y ago

They mean "Bias Fit".

rmason 8y ago

My experience about 'culture fit' was that it was a code word for ageism. Sometimes they'd be even more direct if I pushed back. This wasn't at the end of a 45 minute interview, it was in the first five minutes after I'd already passed the technical review. Might not be true in every instance, but I absolutely cringe when I hear that phrase.

gmmeyer 8y ago
Don't forget about race.
- draw_down 8y ago
  It’s really anything that doesn’t match the team’s (or individual interviewer’s) notion of what a good developer looks like. So it could be how you dress, how you talk, even if you are white and male and not over some age threshold. And I suspect much of that is not conscious, which of course makes it difficult to talk about and address.
  - JimboOmega 8y ago
    I got the job I have now while, for lack of a better term, being "visibly trans", the only person of my race on the team, and also well into my 30s. I don't think it'd be possible for me to look more different than I do from my teammates (especially how the team looked when I started - it's grown and become somewhat more diverse since) That said, I do worry about how my presentation will be perceived elsewhere, it comes time to move on.
    - draw_down 8y ago
      It’s not about looking the same necessarily, it’s about whether you fit the person/team’s image of a good developer, which sometimes can be very narrow. If the team is diverse that is less likely to be the case, of course. Also, people totally get discriminated against for being trans (though I’m glad to hear you didn’t). That seems indisputable to me, so I’m not sure what your point is unless you’re saying that it doesn’t always happen, which, sure it doesn’t.

golemiprague 8y ago

Culture fit is what people really feel inside but don't want to talk about because the current religion dictates that diversity is the best thing for a company. The thing is, for most tasks, homogenous and cohesive team is much more efficient and performant. It is easier for most people to work with people who are similiar to them, both culturally, racially, temperamentally, IQ level and anything else you can think about. Companies, like countries tend to disintegrate when they become too diverse. Sometimes, small doses of diversity are necessary for break throughs and creativity, but it is small doses, not the main way things suppose to work day by day.

donbright 8y ago
Every single sentence you wrote above is factually wrong, demonstrated not only by the study of the history of economics and society, but also empirically in something as simple as a genetic algorithm evolution inside a computer.
- golemiprague 8y ago
  Show me any research about those subjects, especially the ones about diversity and I will show you 100 different parameters that the research didn't and can't control for. Also I will challenge you to reproduce those results and and I am willing to put my left arm on a bet that you won't be able to. On the other hand I can show you very homogenous and successful environments, first and foremost the silicon valley itself. Isn't the common complain is that there are too many cis white males there? So how come it is maybe the most successful part of the economy in the last 40 years or so? What about Japan and Korea? What about almost every sub genre in are and music which was developed usually by homogenous group? You bring me some theoretic algorithm in a computer, I show you huge entities of innovation and success in real life.

SonnyWortzik 8y ago

We joke a lot about that after I was hired as a middle aged coder... during interview Boss: "so do you think you can fit in this culture?" Me: "You mean, do I wear skinny jeans and drink kale smoothies? Probably not, but if you want your work done, does culture fit matter when you have a mile long back log?" Boss: "good point, so... How does your schedule look for next week?" it was all history from there.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Often companies actually do care more about optics than productivity. I’ve definitely worked in large, successful companies where wearing the skinny jeans and drinking the smoothie are vastly more important than your productivity most of the time. Another big, obvious manifestation of this is open-plan offices. “Does working in a noisy, open space that doesn’t actually save significant money relative to engineer salaries and lost productivity matter when you have a mile long back log?” Yes, as it turns out, displaying the optics of looking visually like a hip start-up stereotype does matter more than the mile long back log.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  If you're the person getting stuff done, while others aren't relative to your output, you make others look bad which certainly doesn't help you 'fit in' with the culture.
- komodosquirrel 8y ago
  I see that in start-ups. Their workforce must look "fresh" and "cool", "Instagram ready". This supposedly brings money apparently bored with life Angel investors love to burn. In those companies your product is a lifestyle for investors, what you are actually making is secondary. If someone is talented, it is a worst place to be in.
- meowface 8y ago
  But have you seen this sort of thing at a company that wasn't dysfunctional or unsuccessful?
8y ago

motohagiography 8y ago

Culture fit is a euphemism for shared values, and those are a mix of where strategy meets background. Trouble I have seen is that companies don't talk about those two things because they truly are the value proposition of the firm. Often this is not precisely clear. The real strategy of a company is necessarily hidden, but the direction it yields is something people can align to, knowingly or more often, not. Is the strategy to get acquired for IP or because they were positioned to execute in a growth market, or maybe to create or dominate a market? These are radically different, but you can tell by looking at a cap table and an office what their plan is. Do they need people to not ask questions, or do they need compelling visionaries? Maybe they need people to keep the ball in the air, engineers to optimize and scale big ideas, or new blood in an ossified institution. Those strategic outcomes define culture. When I hear people say, "culture eats strategy for breakfast," I always think, "yeah, without strategy, culture starves." As you can tell I'm a real hit at off sites.

deathanatos 8y ago

Huh. I reserve "culture fit" to mean "did the candidate make racist, sexist, or ageist remarks (or other such similar remarks about something absolutely unrelated to actual engineering)?" I've yet to not hire someone under this. (Though I have one person who I would not hire today, but I still do not know how I would have screened for them in the interview.) Seems like I'm the only one, though. The rest of the comments seem to indicate looking for something deeper.

mk89 8y ago

I think that hiring for culture fit is not the hardest thing to do - it's no different from hiring for technical skills. It just requires that you have some background in psychology so that you can easily spot someone who is lying. Of course, it doesn't mean that you need to have a master degree in psychology. You can learn, and here experience and gut feelings play a very important role, although as someone has said, there are interesting questions you can ask to tell the Rockstar from the team player. So yes, you can use normal questions plus gut feelings. For me more important than hiring the right people is how to retain the good ones and prevent assholes to prevail and destroy the nice atmosphere at work. Prevention is nothing if you don't act when the problem occurs. And eventually it will. I can't believe that companies like Amazon or Google with > 100000 employees only hire great people culturally fit. We are animals, and when put together there is always someone that wants to prevail. And there is always the culturally unfit that somehow sneaks in. The difference is how you tackle that. I have seen and been in companies where the action was literally doing nothing. You have to change to behave in a different way towards the asshole, in order to make your life easier. That's the answer. Lots of "Let's hire for good fit", but no "how to deal with aholes at work that disrupt your work environment". Ps. People should read the "no as*hole rule" book. A first good resource on how to deal with such people.

Suntracker 8y ago

The phrase "Culture Fit" has many shades and hues. Generally, the hiring manager and his/her team would take a call on "cultural aspect", which in principle should be a fair representation of the company culture. But on many occasions that may not be case. If a manager has a bias and certain prejudicial views, it becomes culture of the team/group. In that case, a "culture fit" aspect of interview is meaningless.

jdauriemma 8y ago

If your company culture is valuable to you, articulate the things that make it valuable and write them down. Make sure the criteria are specific and measurable, then apply them to the interview and evaluation process.