Cultural Fit Interview Questions

What Questions Help Determine a Hire’s Cultural Fit?

In some ways, cultural fit is just as important as whether an employee can perform the job. At the same time, an assessment of cultural fit may be key to figuring this out. So how can you assess whether a potential applicant is a cultural fit for you? In this article we will explain it to you.

First, you need to make sure you’re asking the right cultural fit questions. You know, the kind of questions that really get to the heart of how someone works and how they collaborate with others. We’ll explore some of these questions and why they’re important below. But first we want to tell you something…

What constitutes a cultural fit?

A person who is a cultural fit with your company embodies the same values as your company. This is a person who fits seamlessly into your company from day one, who performs their job excellently and who leaves a good impression on colleagues, customers and prospects. In short, they are an ambassador for your company, for all the right reasons.

But how do you find this person? Basically, the answer is pretty clear: First of all, applicants must have the right qualifications. Then those qualifications need to be supported by what they value. These two factors have a fairly dynamic relationship with each other and really go hand in hand to define the term “cultural fit.”

How do you determine the cultural fit of your company?

Before you can decide whether someone is a good fit for you or not, you need to have a clear idea of what it means to be a “cultural fit” at your company. It’s helpful to start at the top by identifying and defining your company’s values. This way, you can put your culture into words so candidates know what to expect.

Then you have to live these values. We’ve written a pretty detailed post about company culture before, but it’s worth repeating: your values aren’t just posters hanging on the wall, they’re deeply rooted in the way employees treat each other and how management treats employees.

Once you’ve done that, we can start thinking about the candidates in our pipeline. First, invest some time in researching your target audience. Ask yourself:

• What kind of talent do we want?

• Do these talents expect anything in return?

• How can our offer be aligned with your needs?

This can be seen in putting together job requirements, writing job postings, and generally setting up a great applicant selection and tracking process. How do you ensure that the people who speak for you are taking the right steps?

What is a cultural fit assessment?

Determining cultural fit requires asking the right questions. A cultural fit assessment is a point in a semi-structured interview, whether labeled as such or not, where you can ask questions to determine whether a candidate’s values align with your company’s values. This will help you determine whether someone can just do the job or whether they can excel at it based on your company’s values and how they would live those values.

As you may have guessed, the list of questions is crucial to assessing cultural fit. To focus our thinking, we should divide cultural fit questions into three different categories:

• Standard questions

• Interactive questions

• Unconventional questions

Let’s dive into each area with the following sections…

Cultural Fit Questions: Standard questions

You can find standard questions in almost every applicant guide. These are the standard questions, the cliché questions that applicants are most familiar with (so they know how to answer them, sometimes even accurately).

While they’re useful for getting things started and helping candidates feel comfortable (because they expect them), they’re not particularly effective when it comes to cultural fit. This is because they are not very meaningful, as a rehearsed answer tells you nothing more than the applicant’s memory capacity.

Standard questions can be:

• Where do you see yourself in five years?

• Tell me three of your strengths and three of your weaknesses

Cultural Fit Questions: Interactive Questions

With interactive questions we can get to the heart of the matter when it comes to cultural fit. These are questions that require a more nuanced response and serve as a springboard for a broader discussion rather than a simple call and response rhythm.

Think about questions like:

• What do you value most about working in a team?

• Don’t like certain elements of teamwork?

• What drives you in your everyday work?

• Is there anything you like about your current colleagues?

It’s also important to keep the conversation flowing as this allows you to learn more about a candidate and assess them better. Basically, the idea here is to gain insight into an applicant’s personality through small talk. It lightens the atmosphere, is more colloquial and allows the applicant to be themselves rather than presenting a rehearsed version of themselves.

Ultimately, these types of questions can determine whether an applicant’s personality largely aligns with the company’s values and vision. This way you will find out who he really is, what is important to him and where he can still improve himself. Because even if an applicant does not immediately represent a value, the ability to develop further is a value in itself.

Cultural Fit Questions: Unconventional Questions

Save the best questions for last. These are slightly more unusual questions, questions that candidates might not expect, and for that reason can be both incredibly effective and insightful. They give you a better picture of the applicant as a person and at the same time invite them to open up a little more.

Here are a handful of examples – but feel free to get creative:

• What don’t your friends like about you?

• Where on your resume did you lie or intentionally leave something out?

• When was the last time you messed up on a project or task?

The aim is not to reprimand the applicant, but rather to give him the opportunity to show a more modest side of himself. Interviews often focus too much on what a candidate has achieved and how great they are – it’s important to know that they also have a human side.

How do you ensure that cultural fit is maintained?

Remember: It’s absolutely important that you try to ask the same questions. This ensures that the questions are comparable and consistent, even if the conversation goes differently. If it helps, create a list tailored to your company in advance of application rounds to give the interviews some structure.

You can later use this list to make decisions about applicants’ cultural fit. It’s superior to gut feeling and helps avoid costly mistakes when hiring new employees.

No applicant has to be perfect and everyone will have their own weaknesses. But there should be as much overlap as possible in terms of the motivation for teamwork, shared values and principles, and the required qualifications of the candidates. This is an essential prerequisite for a successful, long-term relationship between company and applicant.