Good morning,

When you have an open position to fill, how much do you focus on whether a candidate will be a good cultural fit for your organization or department?

Most managers consider cultural fit a top priority, explains Lauren Rivera, a professor of management and organizations who spent a decade studying the recruitment practices at elite firms. Most of the time, she says, this is a really bad idea.

Today, we’ll hear more from her on why hiring for cultural fit likely means you’re missing out on the best candidates, and what hiring managers can do to fix this.

Stop Hiring for Cultural Fit

The problem is twofold, Rivera explains in a webinar with Kellogg Executive Education.

First, cultural fit is often interpreted as whether a candidate has similar interests or a similar background to the rest of the team.

The focus tends to be, “Is this person a fit socially for me? How do I feel when interacting with this person? Rather than, is this person well suited for our organizational mission and strategy?” Rivera says.

Second, when you’re looking for people who are similar to those already at the company, you’re likely overlooking candidates from more diverse backgrounds or underrepresented groups.

“What you’re going to get is a copy of your existing employees,” she says. “In many instances, it is a form of discrimination.”

Rivera offers some advice for changing hiring processes to avoid this sort of inadvertent bias. Here are a few of her tips.

Recruit more widely: Firms often focus on specific criteria, such as having attended a prestigious university, when recruiting candidates, assuming this will help them find the most intelligent candidates. But wealth or race are often more of a factor in who attends prestigious schools than intelligence. “Firms are defining the pipeline in a very narrow way that’s going to limit racial diversity,” Rivera explains. Instead, companies should recruit more broadly, looking for qualified candidates from a wide range of schools, backgrounds, and geographies.

Use a skills-based screener: In unstructured job interviews, it can be hard to truly focus on a candidate’s skills, because once we’re in a room with someone, we start forming opinions that may be rooted in unconscious bias. So, before doing an interview, give candidates a skills-based test—perhaps a coding assignment for a software-developer candidate or a written test for a communications hire. That way, when you move on to interviews, you’ll know that you’re only talking with candidates who have the technical wherewithal to do the job well.

No, this doesn’t mean you have to hire people you dislike: Rivera often hears pushback to her suggestions that sounds something like this: “If we always hire on skill, we’ll hate the people we work with.” This need not be the case. After the skills test, you should still bring candidates in for an interview to make sure that they are respectful and pleasant.

Rivera wrote a book about her research on elite firms. You can also hear more from her in the Executive Education webinar and in this Insight article.

What You Need to Know About Today’s Economy

Prices are surging, supply chains are breaking, and the Great Resignation is hitting all industries. Two years into COVID-19, the economy can really only be described in one word: wild. So what exactly is going on, and where might things be headed? Join Kellogg finance professor Sergio Rebelo—an expert in macroeconomics and international finance—next month for The Insightful Leader Live webinar, where he will offer his unique perspective.

The free, one-hour webinar takes place Feb. 3 at 11:30 central time. You can register here.