How to hire for culture add vs. culture fit
By Jaeson Paul

Want to boost innovation and productivity in your team? Consider hiring for culture add rather than culture fit. Here’s how.
In the 1980’s, business leaders introduced a new awareness of the term “office culture.” On the virtuous side, this meant valuing employees as human beings, not just machines that completed tasks. Businesses began to see that people stayed in jobs longer and were more productive if they felt that they belonged. Having a best friend at the office became a likely indicator not only of job satisfaction but performance as well.
Management started deliberately hiring for “culture fit,” favoring candidates who matched their company’s DNA and would fit in well with the team. Over time, this often led to a preoccupation with personal attributes. Criteria such as “Let’s see if they are someone we can have a beer with” became part of the candidate selection process.
The shadow of culture fit emerged in the form of a bias toward homogeneity. This harms workers, candidates, and businesses as a whole by creating an environment that stifles innovative thinking.
How do you avoid this trap? Change your mindset from “culture fit” to “culture add.”
What is a culture add mindset?
In contrast to the culture fit mindset, which seeks to hire and retain more of what is already working for you, culture add focuses on gaining valuable elements that your culture lacks. In other words, culture fit preserves comfort and familiarity, while culture add looks for people who value an organization’s standards and culture, but also bring something different that positively contributes to your company. The hiring question then shifts from “What is this person lacking?” to “What can this person bring to the table?”
Culture fit mindset seeks to hire and retain more of what is already working. Culture add focuses on gaining valuable elements that your culture lacks.
More of the same is less
When most jobs involved learning and repeating known tasks, simply adding more workers with the same skills was enough: If 10 assembly workers can build one car in 20 hours, for example, then 20 workers could build it in 10.
As work becomes more nuanced – solving intractable operations problems, for example, or keeping clients happy – simple scale no longer works. Solving novel problems requires many perspectives rather than many hands. If you hire to match the personalities, backgrounds, and viewpoints that are already present in your organization, you are actively selecting against your chances of success. If you hire to match the personalities, backgrounds, and viewpoints that are already present in your organization, you are actively selecting against your chances of success.
What is culture fit bias?
The real dark side of a culture fit mindset is that it reinforces any biases that may exist. If your current culture is composed of mainly twenty-something male computer programmers, hiring for culture fit means you are likely to hire more of the same and exclude candidates – even highly promising ones – who do not fit the current culture. Culture fit at its worst justifies prejudice and preference, leading to discrimination and unfair treatment of anyone who does not fit a preconceived cultural mold.
Culture add is not about quotas
It’s important to recognize that culture add is not about checking the diversity box (your diversity efforts should not involve checking a box anyway). Hiring people of different demographics may help increase diversity, but it will not add to your culture if they all think the same way.
So don’t ignore factors like race, ethnicity, and gender - but do look beyond them and think about the viewpoints that make up your current culture, like world experiences, or beliefs about technology and the role of business. Culture add is as much about how a candidate looks at the world as how the world looks at them.
How to make the culture add hiring leap
Embracing culture add can be uncomfortable - especially if your company has historically focused on culture fit. You won’t – and maybe shouldn’t – go all-in at one time, but actively move the needle a little at a time and see how your hiring approach changes. Here are some tips: