Culture Fit: How to evaluate it?

October 28, 2014

TL;DR: Jump to the last section if you wanna take a look at the sample questions.

There are two aspects to our Hiring. The first one being the “Right Skills” for a particular role and other being “Culture Fit”. Evaluating the latter is more tricky than the former.

But what does culture fit mean to us? Culture fit helps us know how well can a potential candidate align with the our organizational values, gel with the team, enhance our culture, grow oneself and help others grow.

We’ve interviewed many candidates with very good technical skills and hired them, only to find after a few months, that there’s a significant mismatch of expectations at the culture level. We’ve known that a candidate with both good technical skills and culture has definitely helped us enhance our culture and bring in more customers but a bad hire has cost us - customers, our people’s time and revenue.

On a separate but related note, we’ve also found that an experienced person (perhaps at a company with a very different culture) takes more time to accept our culture and adapt into our organization, as she has to both learn our ways  and unlearn the old ones. Not many people realize that they have to unlearn certain things to adapt.

But * how* do you test for Culture Fit? Well, that of course depends on your organization and what it is that your culture stands for.

[embed]https://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/2144933705[/embed]

Photo Credit: Hobvias Sudoneighm

At Multunus, we believe that a person who is thoughtful, serious and mature is much more likely to fit well into our organization.

We’ve broken down this further in the following aspects. And as promised, the sample questions for testing each of these traits are also included below:

Abstract thinking

• • We believe in focusing on Outcome rather than Output. Can you provide some examples from your work where you’ve done the same*

Keenness  in organization

• • What questions do you have about us?*
• • What are your expectations from us?*
• • Why should we hire you?*

Analytical Thinking

• • Why did you join a large MNC by leaving your start up?*
• • What are the top 3 lessons you’ve learned so far in your career?*
• • What are the top 3 things you like about your organization?*
• • What are the top 3 things you would want to improve in your organization?*

Courage

• • How long do you intend to work for us and why?*
• • When was the last time you did something that made you feel uncomfortable?*

Career/Purpose

• • Why are you interested in a software career?*
• • What role or roles do you think you can play at our organization?*
• • If you were not a software person, what would your alternate career path have been?*

Teamwork

• • What behaviors are you unwilling to tolerate from your teammates?*
• • What constitutes a good team?*

Patience

• • Describe a situation where you felt your patience was tested*
• • Describe a situation where you being patient helped in yielding results.*

Hope these questions were useful to you. We’d like to hear your way of evaluating culture fit for a candidate. Write to us and help us to improve our hiring process.

References:

• Guest blog post on “interview for culture fit” by Mikey Trafton

• 50 Tough interview questions by Crieghton Edu[PDF]