Culture is no longer just a corporate buzzword, but a vital part of an organization’s hiring strategy. Today, companies recognize that finding candidates who align with their core values is just as important as finding those with the right skills and experience.
Interviewers are often told to find candidates who are a “great culture fit,” but this guidance can raise more questions than it answers, such as:
- What does being a “great culture fit” truly mean for your organization?
- How can you effectively assess these traits during an interview?
- Why is it important to prioritize cultural alignment alongside skills?
Answering these questions is the first step to creating a consistent and effective interview process that can provide you with valuable candidate insights.
What does being a “great culture fit” truly mean for your organization?
Understanding what being a “great culture fit” means starts with defining what makes your organization unique. What values are central to your organization? What behaviors make your best employees successful in their roles? Defining your cultures provides you with specific traits you can look for when screening and assessing your candidates, ensuring your new hires embody those values and not only fit your culture, but add to it.
How can you effectively assess these traits during an interview?
Face-to-face interviews will always give you information you can’t get through a screener or assessment. Your questions should focus on the behaviors and traits you’ve identified as integral to success and on what the candidate has done or would do in specific scenarios.
Why is it important to prioritize cultural alignment alongside skills?
Organizations that invest in culture see increased productivity, loyalty, and revenue, along with higher employee retention.
While an interview provides a unique opportunity to get to know your candidates, it also presents a variety of challenges. Often interviews are inconsistent, subjective, and difficult to score or quantify.
Here are three essential steps to help you establish a consistent, data-driven interview process that delivers objective, actionable insights for more informed hiring decisions.
3 Steps for Interviewing Effectively for Culture:
1) Ask the right questions
Your interview questions should be aligned with your organization’s culture. Once you’ve defined the traits and behaviors that embody your culture, you can then develop questions that target these key competencies.
For instance, if your organization’s key values are collaboration, resilience and innovation, the following questions would help you determine which candidates shared these common traits.
- Collaboration – How have you ensured that everyone on a team is heard and their contributions are valued when working towards a shared objective?
- Resilience – Tell me about a time when you received harsh criticism at work. How did you respond?
- Innovation – Share a time where you tried to innovate on a process or product. What was the outcome and how did your innovation affect it?
2) Develop a scoring model
After defining your cultural competencies and crafting questions that target them, the next step is to create a clear rating or rubric system to evaluate candidates’ responses.
Consider how your top, middle, and bottom performers would answer each question—what specific qualities or details would set their responses apart? This reflection will help you develop a scoring framework that highlights the key behaviors and traits that are most valuable to your organization.
Example: Resilience – Tell me about a time when you received harsh criticism at work. How did you respond?
| Needs Improvement | Meets Expectations | Exceeds Expectations |
|---|---|---|
| The candidate reacted aggressively or defensively to criticism and blamed the criticizer. They did not discuss next steps focused on self-analysis or how to incorporate feedback moving forward. | The candidate took criticism respectfully and was open to self-reflection in response. They did not articulate planned steps or strategies for self-development or growth. | The candidate responded positively and proactively. They took time for self-reflection and analyzed which parts of the criticism were constructive and how they could improve their future work. |
3) Train your team
Once your interview process for assessing cultural fit is fully scoped out, you can ensure your hiring teams are adopting and following it by keeping these three ‘C’s’ in mind:
- Consistent: Hiring teams should understand the rationale behind the chosen questions and know that the purpose is to get answers to those questions.
- Comfortable: Providing interviewers with a question guide and interview tools can help them stay on track and perform effective interviews.
- Compliant: Interviewers should know what questions they should not be asking candidates and ensure all questions they do ask are job relevant.
Interviewing for culture fit is essential to ensure new hires align with your organization’s values. By defining your culture, creating targeted questions, and using a structured rating system, you establish a consistent hiring process that offers objective insights to identify candidates who will thrive and reflect your values.
HighMatch, and our team of industrial-organizational psychologists, can help you design validated, trait-based interview questions and build a successful interviewing playbook leading to more consistent, objective and meaningful conversations with candidates. Watch our recent webinar, Interviewing for Culture Fit, to gain deeper insights and practical strategies for hiring candidates who truly align with your organization’s values and culture.
