Are you still hiring for culture fit? It’s been a tried-and-true approach for years in recruitment. But now, as recruiting teams focus on diversity hiring, this best practice is under fire. Should you continue to hire for culture fit or shift your hiring strategy? How can forward-thinking organizations like yours leverage innovative hiring technologies to support a new direction?
Hiring for Culture Fit May Have a Downside
In simplest terms, hiring for culture fit means recruiting and hiring candidates who align with your organization’s culture. It can be fairly subjective. To get around this issue, some companies try to find more candidates like their existing high-performing employees. This approach has some downside though:
- The strongest teams are made up of complementary players rather than colleagues who are very similar
- It may decrease your ability to create a more diverse workforce
- It may increase risk of discrimination
The culture fit approach may also work at cross-purposes in organizations that are transitioning to a culture characterized by greater inclusivity.
3 Ways Technology Can Support Your Hiring Strategy
Every organization has to pursue the hiring strategy best suited to its objectives. Whichever direction you take, an intelligent hiring platform that integrates advanced selection science with assessment, video interview, and workflow automation tools can accelerate your hiring by helping you:
Understand your candidates on a deeper level
Whether you hire for culture fit or not, an intelligent hiring platform can help you hire qualified candidates faster. Pre-hire assessments concentrate on job-specific core competencies to accurately predict candidates’ future success in the role. New-era interviewing gives you deeper, faster insight into a larger volume of candidates, so you can quickly identify individuals you’d like to fast-track.
And with the proven efficiencies of modern hiring technology, recruiters have more time to get to know candidates on a deeper level and understand their core values.
Reduce unconscious bias
Unconscious bias can kill the success of any recruiting approach. Some science-based hiring platforms reduce bias and mitigate risk by:
- Providing predictive data based on validated science allows recruiters to reduce overreliance on resumes, social media profiles, and other data sources that are subjective and can lead to hiring bias
- Offering assistive AI technology to make the interview process more objective and less biased through automated evaluation of structured and unstructured interviews. Modern Hire’s Automated Interview Scoring reduces interview bias by more than three times.
- Creating consistent and fair hiring workflows for candidate pools of every size
Deliver an authentic hiring experience that promotes better decisions by candidates
As you know, candidates are also assessing you and your organization during the hiring process. Candidates can make a more informed decision about your fit with their values and priorities – like hiring for culture fit from the candidate’s perspective. An intelligent hiring platform allows you to create visuals and messaging that reflects your culture and authentic insight into working at your organization.
Modernizing Hire for Culture Fit
What’s ahead for this approach? With the current labor shortage, some organizations have abandoned it simply because they don’t have enough candidates to fill open positions. Unfortunately, this type of warm-body hiring has a long-term negative impact. Download this Modern Hire resource to learn more about how to hire when starved for candidates.
For other organizations, hiring for culture fit isn’t as important as hiring for best fit for the role. This approach can support success in diversity hiring, especially in companies with an inclusive culture.
Whichever direction it goes, there will be a constant: Candidates will continue to expect hiring experiences that are simple, convenient, and provide the information they need to make an informed decision. In this Modern Hire guide, find out what makes a great hiring experience from the candidate’s perspective.