Cultural fit - how your intuition can deceive you

Cultural fit is an important topic, especially when it comes to recruiting. Unfortunately, in order to find out whether a person is a good fit for the company, people too often rely solely on their gut feeling. In the following, we will look at ways to determine one's own cultural fit and the importance diversity plays in this process.

ulture and working environment of a company or organisation. It is about whether a person's values, behaviours, communication styles and expectations match those of the organisation.

If a person fits well into the culture and work environment, this can lead to higher satisfaction, motivation and productivity. Companies therefore tend to look for employees who fit well with their culture in order to create a harmonious working environment and promote a good working climate.

Cultural Fit in Recruiting

The topic of cultural fit is particularly important in recruiting. Some even say that cultural fit matters even more than qualifications. Does the applicant share the same values as we do? Will they fit into the team? These questions need to be addressed before hiring. 

In practice, a team member is often brought in to meet the applicant over coffee to see if there is a "good chemistry". Alternatively, the hiring manager invokes their own famous knowledge of human nature. Yet how reliable is this assessment for the success of the job?

Decisions based on intuition - Beware, bias takes effect!

Listening purely to gut feeling causes problems. Wherever assessments are made according to intuition, gut feeling or emotions, bias has an influence. Can we really make a decision about whether the applicant is a good fit for the team after drinking some coffee? Are we not deceived by perceived sympathy?

In order to reflect on your own assessment, you should ask yourself directly after an interview: Why do I like this person? And are these things that come to mind now relevant for a job success? Usually not!

Assessing cultural fit is important, just please do it right  

In order to determine one's own cultural fit, one should first be clear about which values are represented in the company and which should be represented in the future. The second step is to define clear criteria for the cultural fit, i.e. to answer the question of when someone fits into the team and how this can be determined.

It is also important to have at least two people involved in the decision-making process to allow for different perspectives. In addition, it should be reflected whether the definition of values also leaves room for diversity. Without this reflection, you can quickly end up preventing real diversity in the narrow search for cultural fit.