The Right Way To Screen For Culture Fit

First of all, it’s useful to separate and understand the differences between the three levels shown below: one’s behaviors, personality, and values and motivators.

When we meet someone for the first time, such as in a job interview, we often try to draw conclusions about their personality on the basis of their behavior. This is understandable, but it is useful to keep in mind that one’s behaviors are only the tip of the iceberg.

While behaviors do matter when assessing a person’s professionalism and track record, they tend to be consciously controlled as well as malleable. In other words, people can make a conscious effort to change their behaviors and adjust them to the requirements of a new environment.

That means two things:

1. The behaviors people display (or recount) in a job interview are often not the ones they will practice on the job, and

2. Even if a person’s behaviors are different from what is expected at your company, they may well be able to quickly adjust to your expectations once made aware of them.

As a result, to screen for culture fit on the basis of behaviors is likely to result in both false positives and false negatives: you are likely to hire people who seem like a great fit in the interview but will turn out to be not so great after a few months on the job, and you will probably pass up candidates who are a great but not obvious fit. 

The second level, one’s personality, is much harder to change as it is partly subconscious. Our personalities, which include our abilities, competencies and dispositions, become relatively stable by the time we reach our 25th birthday, and while they continue to evolve after that, they change relatively slowly.

In addition, personality can be helpful in assessing job fit as certain traits are often considered desirable in certain positions. For example, conscientiousness and openness are often considered advantageous in software developers, while salespeople can benefit from agreeableness, emotional stability, and in some cases, extraversion (or the lack of extreme introversion at least).

On the surface, this may seem to suggest that personality might be a better measure of fit since personality traits can be useful in assessing job fit, are more difficult to “fake” in a job interview, and are likely to be relatively stable for 4-5 years, so about the average job tenure of a person in many countries and positions.

However, hiring for personality is perhaps one of the greatest dangers for companies that want to create a rich, diverse company culture, and by no means a guarantee for culture fit. In fact, since every company has a mix of different functions and divisions, and different types of jobs tend to require people with at least somewhat different types of personalities, it is impossible to create a healthy, functioning company culture based on likeness in personality. Would you like your sales and accounting teams to be similar in their personality traits? Probably not. At the same time, you can’t afford to have a fragmented company culture that breaks apart along functional lines with no glue to hold people of different divisions and personalities together in pursuit of a shared vision.

As a result, while personality assessments can be helpful in determining job fit, they can also result in a high number of false negatives or a fragmented culture when used to assess culture fit, and are therefore by no means the best tool (and often downright detrimental) when used to screen for culture fit. 

What is it, then, that can unite people of different backgrounds, positions and personalities to form the basis of a shared company culture without damaging diversity?

The answer lies in the third level, our values and motivators. These represent an underlying, even more stable layer than our personalities, and are the most important factor in our relationships with others, including in the workplace. People with shared values and motivators find it easier to work together even if their personalities are different, and people whose motivators are aligned with the values of the company they work for will likely be more motivated, engaged and loyal, and will likely outperform expectations.

By assessing candidates on 11 different motivator scales, Attuned’s proprietary psychological tests can tell you whether a person is likely to be motivated and engaged in your company culture regardless of their personality or position.

For example, we at Attuned consider ourselves a company of builders, and as a result look for people who are motivated by opportunities to create great things from scratch.

We are also ambitious in our goals and put the bar high in terms of performance, which means a healthy sense of competition is necessary for people to do well and feel at ease in our culture.

Thirdly, we put great emphasis on continuous learning and teamwork, so people who value progress, feedback and helping others are more likely to fit our culture than those who don’t—even if over-reliance on some of these can potentially be a yellow flag.

By contrast, the reality of our day-to-day as a bootstrapping startup may not always sit well with people who have a high need for security and status.

We share these values and have a strong company culture even though we are diverse and different in every possible way: male and female, single and married, with and without children, straight and gay, diverse in race and ethnicity, different in our personalities and educational backgrounds, and from more than a dozen different countries on four continents.

What makes our lives much easier to screen for culture fit without giving up diversity, of course, is that we can measure people’s values and motivators quickly and in a scientifically validated way using our own product, the Attuned Motivation Assessment. If you’d like to learn more about how Attuned can help your organization, you can sign up for a demo here.