What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
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What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
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Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#2I was at a talk by Emily Chang about her new book Brotopia, and she raised a really good question: why frame it in terms of culture fit, as if culture is something pristine to be preserved? Why not think of it as culture addition, that is, in terms of trying to assess how much one can bring to the table?
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#3Interesting topic, but...
"Among the 300 companies I spoke to, only 20% told me they engaged in screening for specific traits beyond soft skills."
Not convinced self disclosure is the best way to determine what they actually screen for.
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#4Interesting topic, but... "Among the 300 companies I spoke to, only 20% told me they engaged in screening for specific traits beyond soft skills." Not convinced self disclosure is the best way to determine what they actually screen for.
The conversations involved me asking them to talk through the details of their interview process and decision-making. I think there were good incentives for companies be honest (given the context of us matching engineers with them). I did the classification into types of screening after, based on my notes.
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#5In my experience "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in
way I am comfortable with" or less often "What an asshole".
I don't think I've ever been part of a conversation about "cultural fit" that wasn't swimming in bullshit, or at least wading in it.
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#6In my experience "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in way I am comfortable with" or less often "What an asshole". I don't think I've ever been part of a conversation about "cultural fit" that wasn't swimming in bullshit, or at least wading in it.
> "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in way I am comfortable with"
Either that or "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't say why because it would be against the law." "Culture fit" has mostly become a loophole for anti-discrimination laws.
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#7An interesting point that I ended up cutting from the blog post is that companies also use culture as a selling point to convince candidates to join. We have seen this work (convince a candidate to take an offer). However, most companies underestimate how similar their culture pitch is to other pitches candidates hear. I think these pitches are less effective than most companies think they are.
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#8In my experience "Candidate X isn't a good cultural fit" has almost always been used as short had for either "I don't want us to hire them, but I can't articulate why in way I am comfortable with" or less often "What an asshole". I don't think I've ever been part of a conversation about "cultural fit" that wasn't swimming in bullshit, or at least wading in it.
A big classifier I've seen that gets put under "cultural fit" is the "it's not my job" problem. A startup can't have people saying that, but big enterprise companies live by it. Some people just can't transition from one to the other.
I've found in interviews that some people expect to do exactly what their credentials have prepared them for. At least for the places I've worked, that's insufficient for programming and other tech.
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#9I was at a talk by Emily Chang about her new book Brotopia , and she raised a really good question: why frame it in terms of culture fit , as if culture is something pristine to be preserved? Why not think of it as culture addition , that is, in terms of trying to assess how much one can bring to the table?
I think because when we think about culture fit, what people can add is already in the equation. When a culture fit is used to DQ someone it’s because on balance they subtracted more than they added relative to other candidates.
Re: What Companies Mean by Culture Fit
#10Interesting topic, but... "Among the 300 companies I spoke to, only 20% told me they engaged in screening for specific traits beyond soft skills." Not convinced self disclosure is the best way to determine what they actually screen for.
The conversations involved me asking them to talk through the details of their interview process and decision-making. I think there were good incentives for companies be honest (given the context of us matching engineers with them). I did the classification into types of screening after, based on my notes.
It’s still hard to know what this means. For example, all the senior engineers I currently work with are great at telling a story about how they look to hire based on talent, self-awareness, critical thinking, and many soft skills, and that the technical particulars are only incidental guideposts.
Then they proceed to ask candidates to derive a card shuffling algorithm on a whiteboard in 30 minutes and fail them from the interview if the running time complexity would be too high or if they can’t mathematically prove the result would be a uniform draw from the space of permutations of the cards.
Whatever story they tell you, it’s not about whether they are lying or not, it’s about the extreme myopia in tech where these people actually believe they are sleuthing out the inner talents and dispositions of candidates when they are obviously doing nothing but berating candidates with parochial, uninformative trivia.