Does Hiring for Culture Affect Diversity?

If you aren’t focusing on culture and diversity in your hiring in 2022, you are setting your company up to fail. Culture and diversity are arguably the two most important factors in determining whether or not your company succeeds today. It’s something we are constantly looking for in the current hiring climate, but is there a possibility of being able to emphasize both when looking for top talent? Some have argued that hiring for culture affects diversity and inclusion efforts. While it’s definitely a balancing act, it’s possible for you to have both.

In this article, we discuss the benefits of hiring for both diversity and culture, the differences between culture fit and culture add, and what your company can do to measure culture and ensure a culture that promotes diversity.

Benefits of Hiring for Diversity and Culture

There’s a reason why both diversity and culture have become increasingly important for companies to consider. They are both attributed as being a major part of a company’s success. Whether you are hiring with a focus on diversity or culture, either is sure to benefit your hiring strategies if done properly.

Hiring for diversity means hiring a wide range of employees who are different from one another. Whether this means they are of different races, different ages, or come from different walks of life, bringing a diverse team together will also bring together different and unique ideas. Diversity allows people to be more creative, leading to higher innovation. People who think differently will also be able to solve problems with creative solutions that a non-diverse group of people might not have thought of.

Additionally, diversity is a huge deciding factor for young “Gen-Z” job candidates when accepting a job. This latest generation of employees entering the workforce is the most diverse generation ever, so being able to attract and retain top talent will heavily depend on how diverse your hiring efforts are.

Hiring for culture also has its fair share of benefits for employers, including employee engagement and retention. Employees who love their company culture and feel that they are a good fit will be your organization’s biggest cheerleaders. They will let anybody and everybody know how great your culture is, leading to better brand equity with the general public. These employees will also work harder to do a great job, and if they love the culture they’ll probably stick around. If you don’t have to keep hiring new employees, you are also saving a ton of money on hiring and recruitment costs.

Can We Have Both?

Despite both culture and diversity playing such important roles within the hiring process, there have been a number of criticisms from workers saying that it’s impossible to have both. The main fear is that by hiring for culture fit, you are hiring candidates who all think, work, and might even look the same. This creates something called a “monoculture” where employees rely on groupthink and don’t have the capacity to think outside of the box. It may also hinder diverse job applicants from wanting to work for your company.

While it’s true that culture fit can have a negative impact on your hiring efforts, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Knowing where your culture is lacking and relying on culture add instead of culture fit will really help to avoid diversity issues. Emphasizing the importance of diversity within your culture also helps your company keep its focus on ensuring it. Additionally, be sure that you are constantly measuring your culture to see if it needs a push to get to where it needs to be.

‘Culture Fit’ vs ‘Culture Add’

When focusing on hiring for culture, there are two main strategies to choose between. These are called “culture fit” and “culture add”. While these two hiring strategies both focus on hiring candidates with culture in mind, they couldn’t be any more different when it comes to hiring new employees.

‘Culture fit’ is the process of hiring a candidate whose beliefs and values align with those of the company. When hired, these new employees will hit the ground running and fit perfectly into the current culture at your company. They should be able to get along easily with the rest of the team, and will probably think and process problems in a similar way.

When done properly, hiring for culture fit can be quite successful, but there is a caveat. Hiring for culture fit sometimes encourages groupthink and hinders innovation within a company. When you hire multiple people who think similarly and have the same beliefs and views of the world, it doesn’t necessarily allow as much room for creativity and new ideas. If you are hiring people who think and work in the same ways, it may cause your company to plateau instead of grow.

Alternatively, companies may opt to focus on hiring for ‘culture add’ instead. This process involves hiring new employees that may fit into your current culture, but have certain qualities that your culture may be lacking. For example, let’s say your culture isn’t as innovative as you’d like it to be. Your current employees might not necessarily value innovation, nor might they be inclined to have innovative ideas. By adding true innovators to your team, you are leading your culture in the direction you want it to go.

Hiring for culture add is also far less likely to negatively impact your diversity and inclusion efforts. When hiring for culture fit, you run the risk of hiring “cookie-cutter” employees who are very similar to one another. You might also be discouraging diverse talent from applying to your company in your job posts. For example, let’s say you describe your culture as being focused on technology and digital solutions. These cultural keywords might turn older candidates away from your position, thinking they wouldn’t be a good fit. What these candidates add to your culture might outweigh not being the best cultural fit.

While hiring for cultural fit isn’t always detrimental to diversity, hiring for cultural add gives you an opportunity to create a more diverse team while considering the culture at your company. It is possible to have both.

Measuring the Immeasurable

It might be hard to understand how you can measure something like culture within your organization, but it is possible! There are a number of ways that companies can measure their cultures, although some do have their own individual challenges.

• Employee Surveys - employers can administer things like culture surveys and climate surveys to their employees to learn more about how their employees are feeling about the cultures they work in. It’s great to hear feedback about your culture directly from the source, but be mindful that employees could lie or they might not take the survey seriously. If it’s not mandatory, they might not take it. It’s also hard to follow up on results that you might find troubling.
• Focus Groups - these are a great way to get employees together to honestly discuss any issues they are seeing within the organization’s culture to try and find solutions to the problems. They can also be used to follow up on survey results, although this is definitely an extra step.
• Pulse Checks - these allow you to individually “check-in” with employees and ask them open-ended questions to help gauge your culture. They are not time-consuming, and they allow employees to talk honestly about cultural issues.
• Assessments - while the above solutions assess behaviors, assessments take it one step further by assessing the beliefs of your employees - and they’re the only real solution when assessing culture fit and culture add in job candidates. Assessments like Bryq’s are able to measure an individual’s personality traits in order to match them to a company’s values. Behaviors can change, but beliefs won’t. Being able to assess beliefs first and measure behavior second really makes assessments invaluable in hiring for both diversity and culture.

Talent assessments should be able to measure candidate personality traits through indicators like leadership qualities and innovation potential to help gauge whether or not a person aligns with your company culture, or to help you find candidates that will help your company’s culture grow in the direction it needs to.