Are you hiring culture-misfit people?

Gyanendra Kumar Kashyap 

Don’t hire solely based on job-fit, do ensure that the candidate in question is not a culture-misfit…

89 per cent of hiring failures are due to poor cultural fit; 46 per cent of all new hires fail within the first 18 months, states a study conducted by Atlanta based research and management consulting firm Leadership IQ. The study further states that 75 per cent of the new hires would succeed if they fit in with the organisational culture. Now this is an eye-opening statistic, which brings to light a valuable lesson: One of the major ways that companies can ensure successful hiring is to pay careful attention to whether the new hire fits the company’s culture. There is no dearth of examples where newly hired, talented senior executives fail pretty spectacularly. It is found that despite their functional capabilities they don’t align with the very foundation of what the organisation as a whole stands for.

Agreed that job fit is an important criterion for hiring but it makes more sense to complement job fit with culture fit. When candidates who seem to be perfect on every level fail, not being aligned to the organisational culture – cultural misfit – can be one plausible reason. The question then is what should organisations do when hiring people?

Trade pundits have often argued that the key in hiring is not necessarily finding people who thrive in uncertainty but rather finding people who thrive in the kind of organisational culture the organisation strives for. The hiring manager or the selection committee should resist the urge to hire people just because they share the same personality traits and background as theirs. In fact they should look for a fit with the organisational culture as assiduously as they sort for experience and skills.

This requires yet another set of question or perhaps yet another round of one-to-one interaction. So how can companies go about adding another layer of questioning to evaluate how a candidate fits their culture? The possible question, apart from the one meant to test functional abilities, could be: Is the organisation’s work meaningful to the applicant? Is the applicant’s value in harmony with the values of the company? Indeed there is a greater likelihood that employees will stay with an organisation where the work feels meaningful. Additionally, when the organisation’s values are in sync with the employee’s values, the employee feels a greater sense of harmony at work.

Do such efforts help? Yes, they do. In fact candidates who are selected on the basis of culture fit, in addition to job fit, contribute faster, perform better and stay longer with the organization. And when hiring managers neglect culture fit, the company and the employee share the burden. Despite being high on technical and functional skills, individuals who are not a fit (in terms of organisational culture) can be toxic to the culture, and when groups of people are hired that lack the necessary fit, it often results in a fragmented or schizophrenic-type culture. Well if you believe that job fit is enough and that culture fit can be imbibed upon by training & development, here’s a caveat: culture fit cannot easily be altered through training and development.

Isn’t it true that in the case of people centered organisations, an employee delivers an experience that is aligned with the organisation’s culture and brand? The bottom-line is that culture matters and hence job fit should be complemented by culture fit when hiring.