I once flagged a candidate at the pre-employment stage as unfit for the role — rude during the assessment, late to arrive, and unable to safely perform an essential physical task. When I reported it, the response wasn’t relief that we’d caught it early. It was annoyance. Frustration, with me, because there was a vacancy to fill and a business that needed a body in the seat.
Does cultural fit in practice, mean available now?
I’ve been hearing the word culture a lot lately. Our national politics is absorbed in an immigration debate that unavoidably splits into “ours” and “theirs.” Attention-seeking politicians instigate culture wars. Our over-idolised sporting heroes behave in ways deemed to be in line with, or in conflict with, club culture. And in my own work helping organisations select new employees, there’s ubiquitous talk of cultural fit.
Everyone uses the word culture as if it’s understood. Ask someone to actually define it, though, and you find out fast how amorphous and abstract it really is.
Professor Edgar Schein offers a useful definition: culture is a pattern of shared basic assumptions that a group learns as it solves problems of external adaptation and internal integration. A political party in government releases a policy. The media dissects it, the public reacts, and the party doubles down or back-flips — that’s external adaptation, the group adjusting to its environment. Inside the party, a backbencher speaks out against the same policy. Whether that’s welcomed as healthy debate or the backbencher gets quietly “counselled” for creating disunity — that’s internal integration, the group managing itself.
I see a version of this every time a client asks my opinion. Do they have a decision they’ve already made and just want my signature on it, or do they genuinely want my uninhibited view? For me, reading that correctly is a form of external adaptation — my business depends on adapting to my clients’ needs. For the client, whether they can absorb my dissent without treating it as disloyalty is their own internal integration. Sadly, it’s rare that a dissenting or even mildly inconvenient opinion is welcomed. Sometimes it’s the difference between ongoing work and being quietly managed out.
Schein models culture on three levels. Artifacts are mostly visible — office layout, dress code, rituals, logos, values statements. Easy to see, hard to decode. Espoused beliefs sit underneath: the stated strategies, goals and philosophies — what people say they believe, which may or may not match what actually drives their behaviour.
As social psychologist Karl Weick put it: how do we know what we believe until we see what we do?
Which is where Schein’s third level lives. Underlying assumptions are the taken-for-granted, non-negotiable beliefs about reality, human nature and truth that a group has stopped debating because it’s stopped noticing them. When an assumption is held strongly enough, acting on any other premise becomes inconceivable to the people inside it.
Politicians espouse beliefs about what’s best for the country. The underlying assumption, however, is almost always about winning the next election — and the espoused beliefs bend to serve it. Organisations espouse beliefs about teamwork, integrity, safety and “our people.” Those bend too, in service of underlying assumptions about profit or reputation. And recruiters — myself included — espouse beliefs about cultural fit. That belief becomes malleable when a recruiting manager needs a seat filled by Friday.
Which brings me back to where I started. When I call a candidate unfit and get annoyance instead of relief, that’s not really a debate about the candidate. It’s the underlying assumption — fill the seat — quietly overruling the espoused one — cultural fit. Nobody says that out loud. That’s what makes it an assumption rather than a belief.