by
Patrick Glynn
When you’re interviewing a candidate, it’s natural to want to focus on their hard skills and professional work experience. When you spend lots of time with their technical qualifications, however, an important consideration can fall through the cracks:
Am I making sure this candidate fits in with my team and company culture?
Why are Culture Interview Questions Important?
Interview questions assessing a candidate’s ability to fit within and add to your culture (more on that in a moment) can help:
- Increase retention
- Reduce turnover
- Identify candidates that will be more productive and effective faster
- Promote your own culture and brand within the interview process
When you know the kind of person your team needs, and the candidate knows the company culture before they even start, both sides can make more informed decisions during the interview process.
Naturally, it’s difficult to present every highlight and challenge of your company culture across a couple of interviews, but centering a portion of the interview around culture will have direct results to the success of the hire.
Culture Fit vs. Culture Add: What’s the Difference?
As you’re interviewing candidates, it’s natural to look for candidates who fit within your culture or add to it, giving you a person who can shake things up from the status quo.
The best candidates are the ones who do both, says Tim Kuppler, the Director of Client Solutions at Compass.
Let’s quickly define those two:
- Culture fit: Someone whose beliefs, values, and overall ethos align with your company’s. The idea is that someone who “fits in” will be productive and effective in their position based on their alignment with the team’s already-established values.
- Culture add: Someone who brings new dimensions, perspectives, and skills that complement and enrich the organizational culture. In essence, it’s about what a candidate can bring to enhance or complement the existing organizational culture, rather than just fitting in with it.
We call the blend of these two concepts “culture drivers.” These individuals will bring you fresh perspectives in targeted areas for growth (behaviors, skills, etc.) while living your values and supporting your purpose.
At Insight Global, for example, we look for gritty people who connect with our shared values. Their technical experience, personality, and perspectives will help them fit in while pushing the business forward.
“If you go too far in the interview process to look for a culture fit, you may be eliminating new perspectives or fresh ideas for where you want to go,” Tim says. “But if you skew too far for a culture add, you’re nearly guaranteeing higher turnover because they may not have the style that makes your engine run.”
Behavioral Interview Questions Are Great for Analyzing Culture
So, when it’s time for the interview, what questions do you ask when assessing culture? Behavioral interview questions are your friend.
“Behavioral interview questions should elicit stories and examples of how the candidate will perform on your team,” Tim says. Behavioral culture interview questions measure what someone’s done in the past to get a gauge of how they’d act in the future.
As a starting point, here are some broad examples of behavioral interview questions:
- Tell me a story about a time when you had to approach your manager with an idea to improve an existing workflow or process.
- Describe a time when you promoted a sense of value and inclusion across team members.
- Share an experience where you successfully managed competing priorities.
- Can you describe a time when you had a disagreement with a colleague at work? How did you work to resolve it, and what was the outcome?
- Give me an example when you had to provide difficult, constructive feedback to someone above you in the organization (or to a peer or colleague that was not your direct report).
- How do you adjust your communication style when working with colleagues who have different approaches? Can you give me an example?
- Describe an occasion when you intentionally learned from someone with a unique viewpoint.
These questions should be tailored to the skill, experience, or personality trait you want to measure. Once those are established, build your questions back from there. You can also preface these questions with transparency about your culture—both the challenges you’re facing and the things you value in employees.
For example, we value connection and transparent conversation about where we stand with each other professionally. We could express we value those qualities and ask, “Detail a time you’ve had a conflict with a team member and solved the issue by digging deeper into the problem.”
Make Culture Interview Questions a Centerpiece of Your Hiring—And Onboarding
Including culture interview questions in your hiring process will help you reduce turnover, increase retention, and help candidates ramp up to full productivity quicker. You and the candidate will have a clearer picture of each other, which helps you both make more informed decisions.
Culture is at the heart of everything we do at Evergreen. Whether building elite teams or growing a company’s tech capabilities, we get to know the nitty gritty of a client’s culture so we can provide solutions tailored to you.
Connect with us to learn how we can help inject culture not just into your interview process, but into your entire onboarding process and improving team or organizational performance.
