How to interview for culture and why?
Learn from Head of Talent Acquisition, Rob Krzyzaniak, about how he scaled our cultural interview process and what that means for candidates.
Why hire for culture?
Company culture is an elusive secret sauce. We can observe it, we can experience it, but can we hire for it? This question intrigues many talent acquisition professionals who strive to build the company they want to be a part of. In my tenure, I’ve found that you can teach a new employee almost anything, but you can’t teach attitude or motivation. When I look back at some of the biggest mis-hires in my career, they all had something in common. At their core was a disconnect in intricate soft skills, communication style, and the ability to sense the organisation and be in tune with it — in short, they were not a culture fit.
So how do different businesses deal with such an important and yet so indefinable element of the recruitment process? I previously worked for Adidas, where the culture was palpable from the moment an employee first stepped through the global HQ doors. They defined this intangible set of shared values with three core competencies. Yet despite this almost tribal sense of belonging, the recruitment process did not necessarily reflect nor focus on these competencies. Yes, the interviewers and the hiring managers scored candidates on the three core cultural elements. However, these assessments did not allow for structured, in-depth analysis of culture fit.
Although this type of process may have worked for a large corporation with thousands of employees, I knew I’d have my work cut out for me in a small start-up. The importance of finding culturally like-minded people would be that much more vital. When I first joined Taxfix one and half years ago, we were only about 60 people. For a company that size, hiring even one person that alters the chemistry would have been a disaster.
Hiring for culture while scaling
Back then, our founders took on the thankless job of vetting every single new hire with a cultural interview. They evaluated each potential joiner in relation to our values: Understand, Deliver, Develop, and Trust — a simple yet powerful combination of principles that embody what modern work culture should be. Even in our infancy, I was impressed and grateful that we already had well-defined values and that culture was a top priority for C-Levels.
As the new Head of Talent Acquisition, I received the all-important mission of building up our recruitment machine. My team’s goal was — and still is — to deliver excellence in quality and numbers needed to fuel our scale-up dreams. Not an easy feat to achieve. One element of the recruitment process was very clearly unscalable from the beginning — the C-level cultural interviews. This process worked when we had a handful of interviews, but we were now approaching double-digit interviews every week. Needless to say, our executives’ diaries were jam-packed and could no longer support this. We needed to find a solution that could expand with us so that we didn’t lose ourselves in the waves of hyper-growth.
Me and our CEO, Mathis, spent some time mulling over this challenge. How could we still provide the same level of cultural assessment at scale? While evaluating our options, we came to two valuable conclusions; there was already a strong sense for culture embedded in the organisation, and we could trust our team to be the gatekeepers of this culture. The Cultural Ambassadors Training Program was born.
Our Cultural Ambassadors Program
Our cultural ambassadors are a working group of employees from across the organisation that screen potential joiners based on our values. As a final stage in any interview process, candidates meet with one of our ambassadors to discuss our values and working environment.
To join the program, each ambassador must be:
- Nominated by their line manager as someone that genuinely displays our values and lives them every day.
- Approved by our C-Levels as someone that can go in-depth in their assessment and can be a critical warden of our culture.
- Trained up by the Talent Acquisition Team.
Our Cultural Ambassadors Training is an intensive four-step program that consists of theory, practice, shadowing, and ultimately a final test. We arm our ambassadors with a set of interview questions that target each of the four values and give insights into how these behaviours manifest. By choosing a cultural ambassador outside of the hiring manager sphere of influence — usually from a different job function — we try to ensure full impartiality. Structured scorecards help to guide the interview and reduce unconscious bias while providing enough space for flexibility. Of course, our hope is to find people that enhance our culture, not just fit it.
For the cultural interview to be effective, we have given ambassadors full veto power in the process. If it is a ‘No’ in the cultural interview, then that’s the end of the recruitment journey. Even if someone is a perfect fit technically, we won’t move forward if they have fundamentally different values. This can be disappointing on both sides, but it saves a lot of heartache down the line. From a candidate’s perspective, this means finding a more fulfilling environment somewhere else, and for us, it’s the best way to preserve our culture as we continue to grow.
And now we iterate
So far, we’ve been thrilled with the results of this program. Candidates have started explicitly mentioning the cultural interview as a highlight, stating that it’s a rarity to spend so much time and attention on culture during the recruitment process. People also seem to really appreciate the opportunity to have an in-depth conversation with an impartial employee about what it’s like to work here.
As a business, we have quadrupled the team since I joined less than two years ago. More importantly, we’ve managed to keep the spirit of what makes Taxfix such a great place to work alive. But our hard work does not stop here. With over 250 employees and counting, it’s time to relaunch the Cultural Ambassador Program 2.0. We’re eager to implement all our learnings over the last nine months since the program’s first iteration. Hiring for culture is a process, but every investment you make into building the company you want to be a part of is worth it in the long run.
200 cultural interviews down and many more to come!
Want to experience a cultural interview for yourself? There’s only one way to find out — apply.
