On a sunny Wednesday, we gathered 40+ HR professionals in Shoreditch to chat about one of the biggest issues in talent: hiring for culture.
It was the first event from our brand-new community, The Herd, and the room was buzzing.
To kick things off, we asked the audience: is hiring for culture an asset or a barrier to business success? Four people said it was a barrier, but 43 said it was an asset. “Hopefully, at least some of you are leaving the room with a slightly different view than you came with,” said Tom Jewell, moderator and VP Customer at Zinc.
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We were joined by an amazing panel of experts:
- Thomas Forstner (VP of People & Talent, Juro)
- Melanie Folkes-Mayers (Eden Mayers Consulting, Founder)
- Luke O’Mahoney (Sapienˣ, Founder)
First: A culture snapshot
“I’m going to take for granted that everyone in this room understands the dangers of ‘culture fit’ at its most basic,” Tom said. Hiring based on interest, education, or even gender, skin colour, and age is most definitely not the way to go.
So, we asked our panellists to describe what culture meant to them in one quick, snappy sentence.
Thomas described it as “the minimum behaviour that you’ll still tolerate of someone in public view of everybody.”
Melanie framed it as a set of values and behaviours that holds the company together.
Luke said, “It’s how we get sh*t done, and how happy we are doing it.”
When asked what word commonly used to describe company culture most gave them the ick, they didn’t pull their punches.
“Toxic,” said Thomas, “because people throw it around a lot, and what works for someone doesn’t work for another.”
“I don’t like the whole ‘we’re a family’ thing,” said Melanie.
Luke went the most controversial. “I’m going to say values, because they’re poorly defined and people often mistake common decency for values.”
When thrown out to the room, they had more buzzwords: culture fit, gut feel, t-shaped.
When culture fit goes wrong
Our amazing panellists did a great job of taking the conversation way beyond the worst version of culture fit — but not before sharing some stories of how they’ve seen it gone wrong.
As an expert in DEI, Melanie’s seen the negative impact of hiring people “just like us” firsthand. “One of the places I’ve seen it happen the most is graduate recruitment,” she said.
When you’re hiring graduates, their CVs are…lacking. But her clients were hiring based on university background, even when Melanie didn’t think the candidate had the right depth to their answers.
The result? “Two months later, I was the person telling this young lady that she wasn’t going to pass her probation.”
The company had made the assumption that because of her uni background, she’d be fine. They knew that their lack of diversity was losing them clients, but they weren’t willing to hire someone that they’d have to polish or teach.
Luke had some personal reflections to share about how he let personal preference creep into hiring and the impact it had on sales performance. It was his first time as Head of People, and he conflated what he thought was a good person to work alongside with what the business needed.
When they had to hire a sales team, it all went wrong. “We ended up with a sales floor full of really nice people who couldn’t sell,” he said. “My preference had crept in, and I hadn’t identified what was most important for the business.”
To round up, Thomas told us about his focus on hiring “cautious, perfectionist” types at Juro and how it impacted the business. Because the company built an AI platform for lawyers, they had a lot of lawyers on staff (including their CEO) who approached all their work very carefully.
This was great in the beginning — they build processes, weathered many storms, and grew to 60 or 70 people. But the disruption and innovation that they needed for an AI platform in a turbulent economy wasn’t there.
Or, as he put it: “We built a beautiful Ferrari but never took it out for a spin.”
The thing that all the stories had in common? Bad culture and hiring can creep in at all levels in the process — from graduate hiring to the CEO.
Hiring for culture: What actually works
Values-based hiring
“The idea of values is that you’ve got people who are going to be rowing the boat in the same direction,” said Melanie. “But you’ve got to be clear about what the values are.”
The more specific values get, the more useful they are. Kind and considerate? Bad — those are table stakes. Creativity, collaboration, and innovation? Better.
When you’re hiring, you need to ask questions around these things. If you’re hiring for creativity, ask the questions while also making sure that you have the behaviour in your organisation to match. “You say you want culture add,” she challenged her clients, “but you don’t actually like it when it comes through the door.”
Thomas jumped in to recommend The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni, which outlines four types of values:
- What you’re already doing better than anyone else
- Aspirational values you want to work towards
- Accidental values that aren’t incentivised
- Permission to play values (minimum requirements)
He pointed out that a lot of companies stick to “permission to play” values and don’t go beyond, but a solid values-based hiring system needs all four to work properly.
In a similar vein, Thomas believes in hiring for cognitive behaviours over abstract values. He preferred the idea of “operational principles” that expose how a company operates. And they’ve worked it into their hiring system. “It’s much harder to think of a way to look for certain behaviours when you call it something that can’t be used.”
Intentionally hiring for cognitive diversity
In contrast to the idea of hiring for values, the panellists made a case for hiring for cognitive diversity — that is, people who approach the same problem differently.
With Melanie’s clients, tools like the insights colour wheel can help support hiring decisions. The colour wheel gives labels to different types of behaviours and cognitive approaches, to help teams identify how they communicate, solve problems, and collaborate similarly or differently.
“At startups, there’s a tendency to bring people in who are very similar,” said Melanie. “And as the company gets bigger, you can see what’s good about that and what’s bad. If everyone’s really creative, who’s going to finish the projects and keep us on task?”
If someone resigns, she recommended taking a step back. After celebrating what that person did well, ask what the perfect hire in that role might do differently, or what skills they could bring. Colour insights give teams a way to name it and make a rounded organisation.
“If culture fit means everyone is the same and has the same attitude, how do you do disruptive things and make sure your company innovates and doesn’t die?” she asked.
Thomas asked her if it worked the other way around. “If you have loads of different colours on the team, does it help them?” Melanie said it gives them a way to speak about their differences and resolve conflict. “It gives a language to when someone’s being a bit of a pain,” she laughed.
When hiring for culture doesn’t work — and what to do instead
In contrast to the above stories, Luke brought a bit of heat to the discussion: hiring for culture is never a good idea. “I think it’s a bad idea when it’s poorly defined,” said Luke. “I’m more interested in hiring for problems that exist.”
He advocated for taking a long, hard look at the problems that exist in the business — or could in the future. How will your culture need to evolve? What skills will you need?
“If your hiring practices aren’t keeping pace, you’re always going to be in misalignment,” Luke said. “I don’t think hiring for culture is a good idea if your idea of culture is poorly defined, restricted, and grounded in things that won’t be true in the future.”
So we opened up the question to the rest of the panel: what does hiring for business success, not culture, look like for them?
“It looks like a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis,” said Melanie. Where are the industry gaps, or company problems? What do we need to get the skillsets that will solve them?
If you’ve only got one person in the business who can solve a problem, that’s not good enough. Training and planning is important to make sure that you have people who can fill gaps, whether it’s internal training or new hires. “You can teach culture,” agreed Tom. “You can teach people how to behave in a certain way.”
Luke threw us back to the early 1900s: when exploring the Arctic, Ernest Shackleton posted job ads for sailors that outlined the bleakness of their mission — and the hazardous journey that they would have to go on.
“Being clear about that hazardous journey meant every single person came home,” said Luke. Similarly, companies need to be clear with candidates about the journey they’re on. It’s not about creating an ideological culture that doesn’t exist.
“The people you bring in are the ones who are going to get you through that situation and to the other side. You can call that value-based hiring, but it’s actually hiring the right people at the right time to get you where you want to go.”
Final thoughts: Making culture help, not hurt
At the end of the session, we asked the same question again: Is hiring for culture an asset or a barrier to business success?
This time, 14 people said it was a barrier, and 30 said it was an asset.
So what does that mean?
It means that culture looks different to everyone, but there’s one constant: if it’s not helping the business, it’s hurting. Hiring for the jobs to be done, whether that’s pointing the culture in a different direction or solving a business need, is the best way to ensure you have the right people — not putting nice words on a page.
Scrapping hiring for culture entirely probably isn’t the solution. But being intentional about how you hire, is.
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