Hiring to fit your corporate culture

HR Magazine, August, 1999 by Lin Grensing-Pophal

Does hiring people who fit your culture have negative repercussions for diversity?

Jackie Brinton has worked at W. L. Gore & Associates Inc. for 22 years. Brinton handles recruiting, equal employment opportunity and affirmative action for the company, but - like all Gore employees - she has no title.

That's the first clue you get that this company's culture may be different from what you are used to.

At Gore, a Newark, Del.-based technology company, the roles of employees are very fluid, depending on the needs of the business. Many people are not comfortable with the level of uncertainty, flexibility and control that employees experience there, Brinton says.

"It's very important for our associates to be able to handle ambiguity because things typically aren't black and white," she says. "In my experience in HR, when people are not successful, more times than not it's because of the inability to work effectively within the culture as much as it is a lack of technical skills."

While the culture at Gore & Associates may be unusual, the company's goal of finding people who fit that culture is far from unique. Many businesses today are investing time and effort into finding and hiring employees who fit right in with their organization's style.

However, when employers focus too keenly on cultural fit in the hiring process, they can develop blind spots for other problems - such as inadvertently discriminating against protected classes of workers, developing a workforce that lacks complementary skills and personalities, or downplaying the importance of competency-based skill sets.

However, some employers don't even make it that far in the hiring process. They trip themselves up by not having a good handle on their own culture.

Defining Your Culture

"When people say they have a 'culture,' it's an amorphous thing," says Keith Swenson, a principal at William Mercer Inc. in Chicago. "If you can define the culture in some ways, then you can hire for it."

Unfortunately, many organizations can't adequately define their cultures.

Swenson admits that finding the correct balance between shared values and diversity of viewpoints can be challenging. It requires a clear understanding of the organization's values. It requires agreement on those values. And it requires that those values are exemplified and used as benchmarks at every stage of the employment process - from recruitment and hiring, to training, to promotion and termination decisions. It's not an easy task.

Morris R. Shechtman agrees. Shechtman is an employee retention and development strategist and author of Working Without a Net: How to Survive & Thrive in Today's High Risk Business World (American Library Association, 1995). He says that hiring based on shared values is great - as long as the values are apparent to the company. Unfortunately, "99 out of 100 companies we deal with confuse their goals with their values," he says.

He explains that "goals are where you're going; values are how you're going to get there. Values are absolutely critical, but most companies don't know what those values are. They're intent on where they're going, not on how they're going to get there."

Organizations that fail to identify their core values tend to make the same hiring mistakes over and over again. "If you don't know what your culture is, you'll keep replicating the same problems in every hire," says Shechtman. "We see that epidemically throughout corporate America."

Legal Risky Business

Once organizations get a clear sense of their own corporate culture and values, they need to make sure they don't emphasize them to the exclusion of other important factors-like legal concerns.

Elaine Fox, a labor and employment attorney at D'Ancona & Pflaum in Chicago, says there are risks employers must be aware of when hiring based on a cultural fit. Her advice is to proceed with caution. "One of the biggest problems that can occur when hiring based on culture is if the culture you're comfortable with doesn't open the way for women and minorities," she says.

She points out that, when conducting job interviews, it is essentially impossible to avoid factoring in perceptions of how someone might fit into a corporate culture. "You can't get away from that, but you have to be very careful that these choices aren't based upon ethnic, racial or gender issues," she says.

Anna Segboia Masters, an attorney at McKenna & Cuneo in Los Angeles, specializes in labor law, employee litigation and business litigation. When it comes to finding a fit according to corporate culture, she says that companies get in trouble when "they have a profile and the profile has a disparate impact on a protected category of employees."

Masters acknowledges that companies must take steps to minimize the potential for risk, and she believes training is part of the answer. "I think that's one reason companies spend so much time and energy training those people that do the interviews - to make sure they understand the difference between trying to get someone that meets professional and cultural needs but, on the other hand, not relying on stereotypes and first impressions."