A
thin, dividing line exists between hiring for diversity
and for culture fit. If hiring personnel and company decision makers
are not mindful of their recruitment and selection processes, they
may end up discriminating against otherwise qualified job candidates.
A
good point to bear in mind is to be ethical in one's practice. To be
ethical in one's recruitment and hiring practices means to be
respectful of the individual candidate. Remember, most job applicants
do spend time to prepare for their job hunt – resumes, setting up
appointments, going through the usual stages of written exams and
interviews. They also spend time to look well-groomed for their
interviews.
Thus,
a big responsibility lies on recruitment and hiring personnel, for
their behaviors and decisions can impact job candidates in a big way
too: they can either build or destroy a person's confidence and
self-esteem.
This
responsibility is made more challenging as hiring people are also
aware of the need to hire who are the best match, not only for the
position to be filled up, but to find a cultural fit for the
organization.
What
is Finding a Cultural Fit?
Finding
a cultural fit is looking for someone who is aligned with a company's
culture.
Here
corporate culture
is defined as the
beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company's employees and
management interact and handle outside business transactions. Often,
corporate culture is implied, not expressly defined, and develops
organically over time from the cumulative traits of the people the
company hires.
According
to the same source above, a
company's culture will be reflected in its dress code, business
hours, office setup, employee benefits, turnover, hiring decisions,
treatment of clients, client satisfaction and every other aspect of
operations.
Importance of Culture Fit
Because each
organization has its own dynamics, it is just fitting companies seek
individuals who can interrelate, blend well with the people in the
company, and can perform well in their millieu.
Based on studies,
culture fit benefits both employer and employees. One such research
conducted with top professional
firms as subjects, concluded:
hiring is
more than a process of skills sorting; it is also a
process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and
firms. Cultural similarities influenced candidate evaluation in
multiple, overlapping ways. Cultural fit was a formal evaluative
criterion mandated by organizations and embraced by individual
evaluators. Moreover, evaluators constructed and assessed merit in
their own image, believing that culturally similar applicants were
better candidates. Finally, evaluators implicitlygravitated
toward and explicitly fought for candidates with whom they felt an
emotional spark of commonality.
On the other hand,
employees find it more inspiring to work in a company where they feel
a sense of belonging, the bosses and co-workers encourage a balance
of teamwork and individual contribution. As important too, is the
alignment of the company's work ethics with their own personal
values.
Employees who are
cultural fit experience greater satisfaction, and this in turn,
boosts the company's bottomline. According to an infographic from
Entrepreneur, businesses that have high-level engagement with
employees enjoy a 28 percent increase in earnings growth, while
businesses with low-level engagement suffer an 11 percent decrease in
earnings growth. This is particularly problematic because only 13
percent of employees feel engaged at work. - See more at:
How
Culture Fit Can Turn to Discrimination
In
the name of finding the best employees, managers tend to select
candidates that are like-minded, believing that those who are can
contribute to their company's productivity and profitability. In
fact, if done well, hiring for culture fit can indeed give great
results, as one NY article
said. According to the article, the
concept of fit first gained traction in the 1980s. The original idea
was that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and
values — and not just their skills — meshed with an
organization’s strategy, workers would feel more attached to their
jobs, work harder and stay longer. -
But
it also said that in many organizations, fit has gone rogue, […]
fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about
personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals
at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom
they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close
relationships with.
Many
employees report having felt left out or not fitting in with the
office crowd, or with their immediate superiors, at some point in
their careers. Some stayed, but many opted to move on to other jobs
where they felt more accepted. One of the things these employees
observed was 'favoritism.'
Take
the case of a bright young technocrat in the supply chain industry
who decided to join an organization with the belief it would the best
career move for him at that point. He had all the credentials, skills
and knowledge required of the position. He continued to attend
certificate courses to gain new knowledge and skills. In the previous
company, he was often recognized with employee awards due to his
sterling performance and work attitude. Yet in the new company, he
immediately felt his work goals, for the department, were not aligned
with his immediate boss, and his contribution not appreciated. He
noticed preferrential treatment for older employees. The boss
demanded unrealistic goals, while at the same time grabbing credit
for a job well done. Finally, when the young employee decided to
resign, he was told it was not his performance, but that he was
simply not a culture fit.
Favoritism,
bias, preferrential treatmemt, discrimination, – these are all the
same, and they create a toxic workplace and wreak havoc on one's
promising career.
And
their ugly pangs start to show up even in the hiring/selecting stage.
The danger here is when culture fit becomes an excuse not to hire
somebody, not on the basis of one's lack of the basic requirements
for the job, but solely on the hiring manager's “personal fit” –
race/ethnicity, class, status, education, among others.
This
article on leadership
tackles that risk, as well as how to overcome this –
And, as happens all too often when a phrase gets popular,
some of the things “cultural fit” has lately come to mean are
pretty unfortunate – as in Friedman’s case; he’s defining
“cultural fit” as an unhealthy and exclusionary lack of
diversity.
Safeguards
against Hiring Discrimination Practices
HR
personnel, recruitment and hiring managers should avoid
hiring discrimination practices,
such as those outlined by the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission). This
is the legal aspect of hiring.
In
addition, one should observe ethics
in recruitment and selection.
Ethics are
the basic concepts and fundamental priniciples of decent human life,
and this includes such universal values as equality of all mena and
womn, and human /natural rights. (Business Dictionary)
Practising
ethics in recruitment and selection basically means giving respect to
the individual. Respect
is appreciating the worth of someone or something.
Some
guidelines in the observance of ethics in recruiting and hiring:
(People Manager)
-
Be fair and objective in assessing a job applicant's resume, and the
individual (during interviews).
-
Avoid the prohibitive practices set out by the EEOC.
-
Be courteous in dealing with the person.
-
Based hiring decisions on facts/data, such as the candidate's
qualifications, solid data gathered during the interview(s), exam(s)
and observable behavior. .
-
Write an assessment based on competencies and objective standards,
such as the requirements of the position.
-
Inform the person of the status of his/her application.
So,
Hire for Diversity or for Culture Fit?
Gathering
a great team of people that can gel together in the workplace makes
working fun and productive indeed, but it runs the risk of
marginalizing otherwise qualified candidates based on the subjective
interpretation of culture fit of the person(s) doing the recruiting
and selecting – unless these people are ethical in their practices.
Still
on the other hand, even if hiring personnel observe ethics in their
selection of the best candidate for the position, hiring for culture
fit may also end up making the company less diverse than it wants to
or should.
There
is indeed a thin dividing line between building diversity in the workplace and hiring for culture fit. This then calls for the
intricate art of balancing the need to meet these 2 goals.
The
article on leadership mentioned above couldn't have said it any
better:
“how
about if we make sure that when we say “someone is a cultural fit,”
we mean “this person holds similar core values to the core values
that are essential to who we are as an organization.” That implies
that we need to get clear about what those core values are, sort for
them during our hiring process – and welcome all kinds of diversity
beyond that core values match. We’ll be able to build teams and
organizations where employees find the work meaningful and engaging,
while at the same time bringing all the uniqueness of who they are
and how they think to that work. Then we’ll have organizations that
deliver on their values by leveraging people’s differences, and
cultural fit will be a useful standard for this century.”
