Beyond culture fit: how to hire for values that last

Ciara pointed to research linking culture fit to bias. When interviewers look for fit without a clear definition, they tend to favour people with backgrounds and traits similar to their own. That narrows the team, encourages groupthink, and excludes people who could strengthen the company's mission and its relationship with customers.

Raluca added a distinction from organisational psychology that gives "fit" a more useful meaning:

• Supplementary fit: the new hire strengthens a skill or quality the team already has but needs more of.
• Complementary fit: the new hire brings something the team lacks, such as a skill, an attitude, or a talent that is crucial to how the team works.

Both are legitimate reasons to hire, and neither depends on whether the candidate feels like someone you already know.

Ciara was clear about what doesn't work: informal conversations, different questions for different candidates. None of that shows how someone will behave at work or whether they share the values the role depends on.

The alternatives are well established, and Ciara recommended several:

• Use structured interviews built on the competencies the role needs, and ask every candidate the same questions.
• Ask about past behaviour. Research shows it predicts future behaviour better than hypothetical "what would you do" questions.
• Add validated assessments to measure what interviews can't capture reliably. Read more about choosing the right selection method.

Structure doesn't make an interview cold, since small talk at the start and end keeps the conversation human. For busy hiring managers, Ciara suggested using AI to do the groundwork. Describe in your own words what matters for the role, share the job description, and ask for structured questions phrased in a friendly way.

When a company has values that genuinely shape behaviour, Ciara recommends building interview questions around them. Candidates don't need to have worked under identical values before, but they should be adaptable and broadly aligned with them.

The difference shows up in work style. A team that values moving fast and breaking things works very differently from one that values double-checking everything. If you don't discuss this in the interview, Ciara warned, you risk a work style mismatch that affects the culture far more than a candidate's social personality. Unprepared interviewers often end up judging that social personality anyway.

Values also interact with national culture. Element Logic's values are brave, passionate, and reliable. In the company's German office, colleagues giving Ciara feedback sometimes apologise for being too direct. They know they're being brave by speaking up, but they're unsure how directness is read across cultures. For values that are specific to your company and central to the role, assess how candidates are likely to act on them.

Hearing about values in an interview is not enough. Ciara stressed that onboarding should reinforce what the values mean in practice, because research on culture shows that what an organisation emphasises shapes both the group culture and individual behaviour.

She compared it to a group of friends. You know they prefer certain parks at the weekend, so you adjust within the range of things you'd happily do anyway. Values work the same way, because they signal what the organisation emphasises without asking people to become someone else.

Two practices keep values alive after onboarding:

• Performance reviews: include the values, and ask employees to self-assess where they live them well and where they could improve.
• Coaching: helps people reflect on how they live the values and experiment with doing it better, provided they genuinely buy into them.

Who writes the values differs between organisations. Ciara prefers to survey everyone when values are created or refreshed, but formal authorship is only part of the picture.

People bring their moods, beliefs, and habits to work. They notice the gap between what leadership says and how people act. Every new hire changes that mix, which is why values belong in the selection process.

For roles with outsized influence, Ciara recommends assessing for culture carrier potential. If you're hiring a first engineering leader for a team of 30, ask candidates which cultural changes they've contributed to and how. Some will describe reinforcing priorities in regular team meetings. Others will describe using one-to-ones to help people reflect on their own behaviour. Both answers tell you how a person leads culture.

Founders carry disproportionate weight. Ciara's advice to people leaders is to understand what the founder believes about culture early, because it is usually hard to change, and to work with it.

Most organisations have some gap between the values on the wall and the values people live, and subcultures form in different teams. Raluca asked which values to assess in that situation.

Ciara's answer is to align the stated values with the current culture. She has led three values refreshes to reflect how a company had changed. Some values can stay aspirational, such as a push to move faster, as long as you say so openly in interviews.

If leadership won't support a refresh, be transparent with candidates instead. When you use assessments, combine company values with the behaviours a specific role needs. A sales hire and a finance hire share the company's values, but they don't need the same behaviours.

Shortly before the pandemic, Element Logic had about 80 employees in Sweden and Norway. Today it has more than 1,000 employees across 24 countries. Its three values have lasted through that growth because they were written with expansion in mind rather than for two Nordic markets.

This year, Element Logic supplemented its values with DNA statements, developed with input from all employees. They clarify behaviours such as adaptability, the acceptance of mistakes, and continuous improvement. Ciara named adaptability as the trait she most associates with success across the companies she has worked in.

At US scale-up Compass, Ciara saw the company grow from 2 offices to 40 during her time there. Her conclusion is that values-based hiring works at any growth rate, provided you keep checking whether the values still describe how the company works.

She applies the same thinking to formal qualifications. Element Logic advertises roles as requiring a degree "or equivalent experience", because most roles depend on current knowledge and competence rather than a specific degree.

Asked for the one thing she'd recommend to anyone building a stronger, more inclusive culture, Ciara kept it simple: put structure into how you interview and select people, and be transparent about your culture when they join. Assessio's MATCH-V values assessment measures candidates' work values, giving you an objective way to bring values into that structure.