Another Cost of Hiring for Cultural Fit

First qualifier! I’m talking about hiring for cultural fit in a workplace that employs mostly white folks.

Second qualifier! This is not the only cost. Hiring for cultural fit often does tremendous damage by supporting and strengthening structural racism in employment.

Ok, now we can get to it. I’ll start with the personal. As a white child and young adult, I was raised by our country with the notion that white people are not racialized and that race is what other people had so therefore race is what other people needed to learn about. That meant I had lots and lots and lots of catching up to do when I finally found out, in my 20s, that I was indeed racialized (Peggy was my gateway). And that I also had a bunch of stuff to unlearn, too.

Now if we take that premise and start to generalize outwards — if, say, my experience of my race growing up was a common phenomenon among white people, then you might imagine that a majority-white workplace might have a deficit of learning about what race is (and particularly what whiteness is) and how to spot and address its associated power dynamics. And if you keep hiring for a generalized cultural fit, it’s likely you will hire for people who have this shared experience and further deepen your deficit in these core skills.

Sure, you can train us white folks, especially if you go in for the long haul. But what if, instead or in addition, you hired for people who already had these skills you were missing around race? I’ve come across a few of these sets of skills and have developed a few on my own. Here’s an excellent set from the Center for Antiracist Education (CARE) that could do a nice crosswalk to workplaces in general.

What if, during your hiring process, you asked straight up questions like, “please share how your racial identity has impacted your experience at work” (1C) or, “tell me about a time when you challenged a system that caused racial inequity and harm” (2B)? What could your workplace look like in the future? More importantly, what could it be and do?