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Nearly four decades after the first variant of the saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” appeared in print, there appears to be no consensus in business circles as to how to hire for fit with work culture, or even whether this type of contracting must take place. Index of contents How adaptation to work culture became a biased term From adaptation to The difficulty of hiring according to The TestGorilla Culture Test: Hire Based on Maintain objectivity in measurements of the Nearly four decades after the first variant of the saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” appeared in print, there appears to be no consensus in business circles as to how to hire for fit with work culture, or even whether this type of contracting must take place. The challenge is that culture is not something tangible. It is a set of values that a team holds collectively (consciously or unconsciously) and that is expressed in the behaviors and actions that individual members of that team adopt on a daily basis. As such, culture has historically been difficult to define in an objective, quantifiable way that could be leveraged for recruiting.
At TestGorilla we've created a test to help you do just that: hire for culture in an objective, measurable, and repeatable way. We call it the culture fit test because it helps you identify and hire people who can thrive in your organization and contribute positively to its culture. Before we delve into the test and how it works, we will discuss the main objections to hiring based on work culture fit and how the phrase “work culture fit” in particular became a biased term. How adaptation to work culture became a biased term Patty McCord, Netflix's chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, advised Brazil Phone Number Data companies to stop hiring based on work culture fit. Facebook banned the term entirely in its hiring processes. Why did these extreme retaliations occur against attention to adapting to the work culture in hiring? Because the adaptation to the work culture “became corrupt,” according to Lauren Rivera in an article in the New York Times. Quote from Lauren Rivera New York Times Rivera traces the origin of the term “work culture adaptation” to an article by Jenifer A. Chatman on person-organization adaptation.
Chatman defined “person-organization fit” as “the congruence between organizational value patterns and individual value patterns,” and concluded that such fit can increase job satisfaction and retention. The business world, eager to hire better candidates, improve teams and increase both employee engagement and satisfaction, quickly adopted the idea, but without a good instrument and a good process to evaluate the adaptation to the work culture, the application of the concept made things worse. The person's personal values were equated with their personality traits, hobbies, and social interests. Additionally, the organization's values were transformed into the hiring manager's cultural experiences, educational background, and social preferences. Over time, “fit” stopped being about value congruence and became about “fitting in” socially as decided by the hiring manager’s “gut feeling” about each candidate. And “culture” became cultural banalities like ping-pong tables, beanbags, free coffee, and other perks that companies (especially Silicon Valley tech companies) began to offer employees, and that had very little to do with them. do with the deeper values of workplace culture.
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