When startups hire, it’s often for a job that needed to be filled yesterday. Products needs to be built and sales need to be closed.
Common at the early stages is a hiring strategy revolving around the founders’ and early team’s first-degree network. This is not necessarily an intentional strategy but a reaction to dozens of other priorities in an effort to optimize the process. Founders think: “I need people. I have a lot to do. Who do I know? How can I spend as little time on this as possible and achieve the outcomes I need?”
In a desperate attempt to bring people into the fold who can both get the job done and won’t rock the boat, these new hires may already know the team and won’t need to spend precious time “fitting in.”
“We want someone who’s going to be a culture fit (or a ‘ninja’ or ‘rockstar’),” they’ll say. Or, they’ll take a “we’ll know it when we see it” approach.
I get it—hiring is incredibly time consuming and difficult. Quantifying exactly what’s needed for a new hire at a startup is daunting as their responsibilities will undoubtedly change drastically over the coming months as the company scales.
But we tend to want to associate with people who are like us, and when interviewing, it is easy to become starry-eyed at a candidate who passes the “I’d have a beer with them” test. Plus, convincing someone to join a risky startup is no small feat.
But using “culture fit” as a qualification can be a slippery slope because oftentimes, it leads to a team of homogenous perspectives. We’ve all heard by now that diverse teams perform better—there’s clear data to prove that they lead to better financial results.
I want to believe that most startups want to build diverse and inclusive teams, but as we’ve heard time and time again, getting started with any sort of diversity initiative can feel like a massive hurdle.
A subtle mindset shift can make a big difference in hiring efforts that will contribute to more diverse and inclusive teams. So, stop using “culture fit” as an excuse. Instead, talk about proactively and specifically hiring for “culture add.”
We’ve heard it after interviews: “Eh, she’s not a culture fit.” Or even the proactive: “We want someone who’s going to be a culture fit.” The problem lies with not defining what “fit” means and allowing the folks doing the hiring to make a call based on a feeling. While, yes, candidates can be assessed based on alignment with a company’s values, “fit” is too nebulous and open to interpretation.
Candidates who are generally underrepresented in society are often the most negatively impacted. As Patty McCord of Netflix fame says: “This misguided hiring strategy can also contribute to a company’s lack of diversity, since very often the people we enjoy hanging out with have backgrounds much like our own.”
Although it’s tempting to operate on gut when hiring, a way to avoid the “culture fit” trap is to follow a quantitative approach to interviewing. Hundreds of resources are available on how to do this, but I particularly like Medium’s post on their engineering interview process. (You can access additional resources and strategies at Chicago Blend.)
When hiring, ask yourself how the people you’re interviewing can add to your current culture and team, rather than fitting in. Consider every new hire an opportunity to enhance the existing team. You’ll need to continue intentionally building diverse teams and maintaining an inclusive culture, but by shifting your mindset a bit, those things should come more naturally.
Lindsay Knight is the director of platform at Chicago Ventures and a board member of Chicago Blend, an organization examining diversity gaps in Chicago’s tech community.
