Ok dont hire pedants either.
In a normal job with normal people cultural fit is bullshit.
You seem to think that the candidate is owed something. They are not. There is very little upside to communicating that information directly to a candidate. Maybe a postcard from HR.
Imagine that conversation…
Employer: You didn’t get the job. Have a nice day.
**Candidate: **Why not?
**Employer: **We went with a different candidate.
Candidate: What did they do better than me? Do you have any tips on how I could interview better? Are there other positions I might be qualified for? Was it because I XYZ?
**Employer: ** We had many qualified candidates and hired the best possible one for the role.
Candidate: Is it because I [protected class]
click
Very little good can come of it, and a whole lot of bad. I recommend to all my hiring managers to never give a reason. None is owed and can only harm you and the company. Maybe if they sign an indemnity agreement I would think about “being nice” and even then, probably no. No upside.
I don’t want normal people. I want exceptional people.
Candidate: Can I do some extra credit work to get the job?
I disagree.
On a macro level, maybe that’s true. But every job is micro. You’re working closely with a handful of people. those people work a certain way, have certain personalities, etc. And they want and should have the right to work with somebody they like.
My company (within broad qualification parameters) hires for personality and trains for roles. You hire somebody who is enthusiastic about the company, intelligent and who is eager to learn about the company’s products and services and they will be great. You can train them to gain the particular skills they need.
You hire somebody who is highly skilled at a particular role, but doesn’t identify with the company and has no enthusiasm for the grander ‘mission’ and you’ll regret hiring them sooner or later.
Right, except some people have decent resumes, but aren’t “normal”.
I’ve worked with a lot of people who had much better skills on paper than I did. And I used to wonder, if this guy is such a hotshot why is he down here in the trenches with me? But there’s always an answer to that question. It might be that they cannot get along with people. They’re a whiner, a complainer, a crybaby. They randomly don’t show up to work sometimes. They have anger issues. They have crazily specific environmental needs. Or, they’ve just changed careers and will be moving up soon and took this job as a first step. That’s a thing as well. I think I have some ideas about why I’m not further along in my career, but at least I can get along with people.
I’ve done a lot of interviewing over the past year.
I do absolutely believe that culture fit is real, it’s a benefit for both the employee and employer to have a good cultural match, and it’s at least as important and probably more so than actual technical skills (I’m hiring software engineers).
It’s also one of the hardest things to figure out in an interview. I’m trying very hard to get better at it, because we’ve gotten a couple bad hires in the past year that are bad hires not because they can’t do the work, but because they just don’t fit.
Some general examples of this:
-
getting in fights with people over stupid things, and not letting it go. We’ve had young engineers with big egos drive everyone nuts because they liked technology <x> and someone wanted to use technology <y> and they would not let it go. Also, making a huge stink about the company laptop, the network security, or any other infrastructure kind of thing that is not going to be changed just because someone would rather it worked differently.
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We are a company that values progress and results. We are given a ton of leeway with how each group or team does things, but in the end, visible progress is more valued than planning everything out up front before writing a line of code. For people who are more planning-oriented or not comfortable taking some risks, this is a huge cultural problem.
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we’ve had people not like the management structure and get really, really vocal about it. Dude, we’re sorry you’d rather have a flatter structure or another level of management, but you started a month ago. The CEO on down is not going to restructure the company for you.
There’s a few more, but you get the idea.
We don’t often turn people down because of culture fit - it’s much more common to turn people down because of technical skills. But every once a while it happens. The last time it was a guy who, during the interview, would ask questions of the interviewers then interrupt them halfway through their first or second question. After 2 hours of this, none of the interviewers could imagine working with the guy, so he was a “no - bad culture fit” rejection.
I’m amazed any seeker ever gets a potentially real response (“you’re not a good cultural fit”) and that any employer has ever given one. As Bone said, what is the upside for the company of being directly honest? You open up a liability.
That said, there sure is an upside to a boilerplate response to non-selectants. It’s easy, decent, polite, professional, and avoids creating bad will unnecessarily. One day, you’ll blow off a person who later becomes more important and could potentially do you a favor. You won’t remember him, but he’ll sure remember you.
I’ve usually received some version of “Thank you for applying for _____. While we appreciated learning about your skills and experience, we have decided to select another candidate. Best of luck to you in your future endeavors…”
Were I to receive nothing at all after an interview, I’d know I dodged a bullet not being hired by a rude company who can’t even manage some version of that. It’s not very difficult or time-consuming to treat applicants as politely as they’ve treated you – even if, at the moment, they can’t do anything for you.
There are 4 basic things all employers look for.
- What is your knowledge or skill?
- Will you fit into this workplace?
- How long will you stay?
- How much will you cost them?
#2 is what you are talking about.
Giving a not-selected candidate a “reason” is like talking to the police when you are a suspect.
It cannot help you, and may give them something to use against you.
Say nothing.
True. I recall a job once for which I was eminently qualified, and which I got. But it soon became apparent that I did not fit in.
The other employees took off to the gym on their lunch hours–not me, I preferred to eat lunch in the lunchroom while I read a book. After work, they’d head off to the gym again; I simply went home. Conversation at the water cooler was all about how much somebody had bench-pressed that day, or who beat who on the tennis court at lunch. There were a few snide remarks: “Why do we never see you in the gym at lunch or after work, Spoons?”
It wasn’t for me; I was obviously not a good fit for that place, and no matter how challenging and interesting the work was, it was not a good cultural fit. I ended up quitting after two months, and found something that suited me (the whole “me,” not just the professional “me”) better.
Sounds like grounds for a lawsuit…I am waiting for some muslim to sue Abercrombie and Fitch because they demand that the pictures of pretty nekkid kids be taken down.
Honestly, it would never occur to me that fitting in this way would be relevant at all to the job nor would I care about it one bit. I would look at the job/career as how it fulfills me in other ways, how it pays, etc. I have friends outside of work, family, hobbies, etc. If I hated the work or the pay sucked, then not hanging out with the bros might be an extra negative, but it wouldn’t be a primary reason. Those people don’t pay my bills, raise my kids, whatever, why would I care if I play tennis with them? And when hiring I want people who can perform the tasks, not party with me or want to sleep with me or be in awe of my hacky sack skills. If anything I prefer not to work with friends.
While I think “fit” is important and legit, a lot of the responses in this thread seemed pretty superficial and completely irrelevant to work. Yeah, you don’t want people who are going to complain, miss work, cause problems. That’s obvious. But there are plenty of good, beyond competent people in most fields who aren’t superficial extroverts.
That said, if anything giving a reason as “cultural fit” seems like it’s saying way too much. It sounds bad. Don’t give a reason at all.
Well sorry but almost every job out there is like this especially private companies. Everyone of them has their own kind of culture.
Now working for the government is different in that working say as a database administrator would be pretty straightforward in comparison to running the same database program at say an athletic wear company.
But most of the anecdotes in this thread are about bad personalities rather than cultural fit.
If you think that a colleague is, or a candidate would be, a pain in the arse to work with at this or any other job, thats not an issue of cultural fit. Its only “fit” if you can think: this person , although skilled, wont work out here - but they would thrive at so and so.
And Spoons story clearly shows the dangers of a homogenous workplace. Less fit earlier would have been good.
It’s not just a matter of people wanting to work with introverts. A person who always wants to do birthday celebrations and get together with coworkers after work isn’t going to fit in with a group of people who want to do their work and go home , who want to socialize with their friends rather than coworkers. People who don’t like birthday celebrations , etc are not going to fit in at a workplace that’s always collecting for this month’s birthday, and throwing showers whenever someone get married and has a baby. Conversely, a socializer isn’t going to fit in at a place where people give them blank states when they try to organize these things. There’s also a large group that doesn’t really care and can fit in at either place.
Bolding mine. That’s exactly the point, isn’t it? In your department, people that want close, personal relationships with their coworkers are not good cultural fits.
I’m at a STEM school. We definitely think about “fit” when we hire–these are nerdy students, but also very needy ones in particular ways. There are plenty of good teachers out there who wouldn’t be a good fit for our campus culture. On the other hand, we also think about variety–we want different sorts of teachers to click with different sorts of kids, and expose them to different points of view. So it’s a balancing act.
It’s not a good idea to ask why you didn’t get a job, which sounds passive aggressive, but it can sometimes be fruitful to reach out and politely ask for general feedback- I’ve seen it work.
Last time I was involved in hiring, I turned some people down for “fit” because they clearly wanted to be in our particular (high-demand) industry, but didn’t demonstrate an interest in or enthusiasm for the operational side that was our office’s day to work.
It was a great career-launching position for people who want to dive in to the operational side, but would just be frustrating and short-lived for people whose hearts were clearly set on the “sexy” side of the field. You want a job like that to go to someone who is going to see it as a positive experience that builds their career path, not a frustrating deviation from where they really want to be.
I had another situation like that earlier. We had an admin/secretarial job in a “sexy” field. We’d get all of these amazing resumes from people wanting to break in to the field who had prestigious internships, good degrees, and really great experience.
But every time we hired that profile, it didn’t work out. Within months they’d be pitching unwanted and distracting ideas, trying to weasel on to already-full project teams, asking to travel and attend conferences, etc. These are usually good traits, but what we really needed was someone to make copies, process invoices, manage time cards, and draft routine documents. The needed traits were not “initiative” or “potential”, they were reliability, timeliness and organizational. We didn’t have the managerial or administrative bandwidth to manage another non-admin employee.
I think they are owed basic courtesy, which would include being told if they are no longer in consideration for a job if they came in for an interview. Although, I’ve found that sometimes it can takes months after an interview for companies to figure out if they actually need/can afford you.
To echo kayaker, most of the time it’s nothing wrong with you. There is 1 job and of the 5 identical candidates, it didn’t happen to be you.
I find this attitude amusing. Is your group or company doing exceptional things? Exceptional people tend to want to work at places like Google, McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. Or maybe some startup. Yet it seems like every company thinks they are going to find some “rock star” to do the most menial tasks.
I think it’s one reason older employees have a harder time finding jobs. You can’t hold the carrot of “we’ll grow you into this future role” in front of them while having them do their bosses job.
Yes, because right-wing conservatives would never have a problem with an advertising campaign consisting of scantily clad models of questionable age in sexually ambiguous poses.
However, IIRC, there have been lawsuits against A&F for forbidding Muslim employees from wearing religious head scarfs.
I’m curious to see how a keen legal mind like yours weights in on the topic of the rights of corporations to enforce how their employees dress vs the rights of weird religions to wear their weardo clothes in America.
People here are talking about culture as if it’s some random, moderating influence on companies but it’s much deeper than that. The Facebook culture of “move fast and break things” is necessarily very different from NASA culture because they are operating in different markets. Large companies want specialists who can slot into well defined roles and execute from day 1 while smaller companies want someone who is adaptable and willing to deal with constantly changing requirements. When you do something that’s not technically part of your job description, whether your co-workers react with delight or feel threatened is part of the culture and sometimes they should feel threatened if following procedure is more important than trying to innovate. Some companies want everyone in the company to be a subject matter expert on the thing that they sell, others want just the front line people to be and to shield the backend people from ever having to think about the specifics of what they’re working on.
The point is there’s no universally right or wrong culture and multiple viable options in the space. Walmart is different from Nordstroms which is different from Amazon and all 3 can survive but if you move a Nordstroms person into Walmart, they’re likely to be unhappy because they’re fundamentally different cultures.
I have friends who work at Uber and Lyft and, even though they both do essentially the same thing, their cultures are oil and water and it shows in their products. You can try and dismiss culture all you want but culture fit is a real and important topic and, empirically, bad culture fit is often one of the if not leading cause for an employee not working out.
All that being said, “not a culture fit” is still the “it’s not you, it’s me” of failed job applicants and often means everything except “not a culture fit”.
You ought to look at people in maintenance. We are happy to sit back and do our jobs in the background, hopefully you never even see us work. When your not looking we are changing lightbulbs. Making sure the toilets and sinks arent backed up. Making sure the temperature is ok. Fixing that squeaky chair. Replacing toilet paper and paper towels. Keeping the building clean. Making sure the feminine hygiene machines are stocked and working properly.
Its funny how when people look at the body they think the head and heart are the most important. They neglect the anus. If the anus stops up the head and heart quit working pretty quick.