Hiring for Culture versus Qualifications – What Matters Most?

The debate continues. What matters most as you hire new employees, their cultural fit or their skills? And what are the most effective ways of uncovering both in the interview process?
 
Once upon a time, interviews focused solely on your resume which was a standard report of your work experience and education. Oh yes, there was always a sentence or two at the end that filled in some personal information about your family perhaps or how you spend your leisure time. But the questions zeroed in on your professional life…where you had worked, in what capacity, and why you had left.

Behavior based interviewing training has taught interviewers how to dig beneath the surface to learn more about a candidate’s on-the-job behavior. It is no longer enough to check out the work experience. Interviewers want to be able to predict how a candidate will actually operate in their unique work environment. They want to know about their work ethic, their ability to get along with others and their willingness to accept feedback and learn new skills. So the savvy interviewer is able to ask questions that uncover a candidate’s attitude.

Smart interviews go a step further. They seek to determine cultural fit. Will the job candidate be able to adapt to the company culture and thrive in the organization’s environment? As a job applicant in this situation, you never know just what questions you will be asked. They can be as bizarre as “Would you rather watch Star Wars or Star Trek and why?” or as apparently irrelevant as “Where do you go for vacation?” These questions are asked in an attempt to learn about an applicant’s working style and to predict their fit with the company culture…how they do business day-to-day.

So what is the answer? Today’s gurus seem to favor the notion that what matters even more than skills and qualifications are attitude and working style. Skills, they say, can be learned; one’s basic personality cannot and comes with the package. Too many new hires (90% by some accounts) leave companies because they do not fit with the culture. So smart companies now spend time defining how they work and what they value; then they seek employees who have the same orientation and who will be aboard for the longer-term.

Bottom line? As counter-intuitive as it seems, high growth companies don’t necessarily hire the most skilled candidates. They want new hires to stay. They do not want the disruption and cost of the turnover of new hires that don’t fit.