In the previous article, I reviewed several frameworks for archetypes and personality classification, such as CliftonStrengths, True Colors, and Jungian Archetypes.
Although no single label can capture the full complexity of a human being, those tools helped me understand the group’s dynamics and identify potential gaps to address when expanding the team's headcount. But this is just the beginning of the work involved in building a diverse and high-performing team.
Today, we will continue this subject from a slightly different angle. I invite you to explore why the concept of “cultural fit” checks can damage your team and organization.
Here, you can find a PDF cheat sheet summarizing this article.
Hiring
The hiring process, from writing the job specs to sourcing to meeting candidates and onboarding them, is both the most critical and the most demanding task for new engineering leaders (this subject deserves a dedicated article, which I will publish in the future).
If you work for a large or well-established organization, it’s not that bad. Most likely, you have some processes in place—hiring scripts, a list of questions to ask, or colleagues who have already done recruiting and can onboard you into this work.
In younger companies, most of that falls on you (Team Leader, Engineering Manager, or sometimes Tech Leader). This was my experience at a startup world - the rule was simple: if you grow the team, you own the hiring process.
Competence vs Personality
When you start hiring, the default is often this: you hire for a specific skill set, ideally with experience in your domain. You look for people who work in Java, know some design patterns, and are fluent with The Twelve-Factor App and SOLID principles. Spring, databases, and building REST APIs are nice additions. And if the person has worked in your industry—Fintech, Edtech, Entertainment—they're already a perfect candidate.
Over time, you realize you need something more. Agile, Teamwork, Passion—these keywords often define the core of a company’s culture (in my distant past, “no one party like us” was one such value 😉).
With that in mind, you discover the concept of “cultural fit,” which assesses how well a candidate suits the company’s style and culture.
Cultural-Fit – Are They Like Us?
In practice, a “cultural fit” check often becomes the single driver of a soft-skills interview. Without proper training, such sessions tend to follow our instinct to surround ourselves with people like us (a personal bias). This bias can lead to hiring candidates with similar backgrounds, experiences, or personalities rather than focusing on competence and character.
But here’s the thing: you don’t build a family or a group of friends where everyone loves to party together. As mentioned in “No Rules Rules” by Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, you build an Olympic sports team where you look for the best players for each position. They cannot all be the same; they must complement each other.
In his book, “Empowered,” Marty Cagan says:
One of the unintended and damaging consequences of hiring people like us is that they too often think like us. It’s not that the way we think is bad, it’s that what we really need are people that think differently from us.
— Marty Cagan, “Empowered”
In the early days of my career as an engineering leader, I managed an all-male team (the entire org’s engineering department was ~30 men exclusively). When we interviewed a talented female engineer who met all of our requirements, some team members raised concerns like, “Do you think she will feel comfortable in our loud meetings with bad jokes?” or “I don’t think our hermetic culture is welcoming for someone like her.”
None of these engineers was a misogynist or openly prejudiced against women. In fact, the entire organization (outside the IT department) was multilingual and gender-balanced, even at the top management level. Engineers’ behavior was more a mix of concern and fear. But these are prime examples of gender bias.
Ultimately, we made a great decision and hired the first woman to our team. Then, we hired the first person who didn’t speak our native language. Fast-forward to the future: we built the most diverse tech team in the entire organization. It didn’t come for free—the culture needed to change. The team softened communication, eliminated off-color or offensive jokes, switched all verbal communication to English, and developed ways to include everyone’s opinions (like using Post-Its instead of shouting over each other).
Btw, I described some of these experiences in this old blog post: 23 lessons learned after multiple years at IT start-up.
Culture-Add Instead of Culture-Fit
Gender bias is an extreme example of “cultural fit” checks gone wrong, but I have seen more subtle cases in my personal experience. For instance, hiring parents onto a young team that worked around the clock and ended the day with a hard party. Or hiring a highly introverted person onto a team of extroverts. Or, as mentioned earlier, hiring the first person who didn’t speak our native language. Or a person who needed an extreme-hybrid schedule—a very talented student who couldn’t be in the office most of the time because they were combining work with college.
Each of these situations was challenging at first. From changing our language of communication to setting “office hours”—a two-hour window in which everyone was available—to all aspects of asynchronous communication to establishing clear goals and the team’s defined capacity (we didn’t care if you worked in the evening or morning, but there was a certain commitment that had to be delivered).
But each of these changes made us better, more organized, more outcome-focused, and full of trust in each other. All of these additions contributed to a high-performing team—not only through hard skills and competencies but also through what was added to our team’s and organization’s culture.
Hiring for Team Extension
In Empowered, Marty Cagan emphasizes the importance of viewing your team as a portfolio of strengths and backgrounds. When hiring, consider how a new team member can complement and extend the existing team’s capabilities:
Diverse Perspectives: Look for candidates who bring different viewpoints and experiences to the team.
Complementary Skills: Seek individuals whose strengths fill gaps in the current team’s skill set.
Growth Mindset: Prioritize candidates who demonstrate a willingness to learn and adapt.
The concept of “cultural fit” can be problematic and potentially harmful when building a great organization. Many companies use this term as a politically correct excuse to hire people who look and think like they do, often leading to a lack of diversity and innovation.
Instead, focus on the following:
Prioritize Competence: Ensure that candidates have the necessary skills and expertise to succeed in the role.
Focus on Personality: Look for individuals with strong character traits such as integrity, work ethic, and passion for the technology, product, and customers.
Seek Diversity: Rather than hiring people who fit the existing culture, look for candidates who can extend and enhance the team’s capabilities and perspectives.
End Words
Hiring is a tough challenge. But firing people is ten times worse—you will always find excuses not to do it, try another “performance improvement plan,” or give it another chance. That’s why, in the first place, you must do your best to find the right candidates for your team—not those who are just like you, but those who will extend your capabilities through their different points of view, beliefs, backgrounds, life situations, and more.
A cultural fit doesn't necessarily imply sameness. My current workplace has quite a diverse range of engineers and others. Our "culture" is one of being a family, where we are all on a first name basis with everybody else, including our exco, who are all know casually to use all - there are no suits hiding away in upstairs offices somewhere.
We value mutual assistance in our engineering endeavors, and we value precision and correctness, as well as friendly cooperation between the engineers, QA, BAs, HR, and Legal, where in some places there is a distinct "us and them" relationship, especially between engineers and other teams.
Anyone that has a similar attitude is a good cultural fit for this company. Not someone that has a similar personal life, personality, religious views, sexual preference as any group here that shares those values.
I did complete two comprehensive personality assessments, one after I was hired but before I started, and one on starting. These are for HR to use in forecasting my career development path, not to see if I fit in. The only distinct question about my personality I was asked during the interview process was, because I am 55 years old and thus probably the oldest engineer, despite being two grades below my team lead, was how I get on with much younger people, and my response was that I'm very young at heart and find it easy to establish rapport with youngsters.
Love this Mirek. As long as leadership is committed to hiring people who bring diversity, whether in personality, viewpoints, gender, or race, this works. The problem is when they say they want it but don’t create a culture that actually supports it.