Hiring for Culture Fit: How Your Values Can Lead the Way
Imagine this scenario: you've been trying to fill a role for six weeks. The team is stressed and cranky because the extra work is falling on them. Your manager is asking questions about what is taking so long. You are feeling it from all sides. You open the next resume and on paper, the candidate is perfect. They check all the boxes: experience, education and availability. You interview them and they give you all the answers you want.
Three months later, you're having a conversation you didn't expect to have. The work is fine, technically. But something isn't landing. They're creating friction you can't quite pin down. Other team members are starting to come to you with concerns.
And if you're honest with yourself, you knew. There was a moment in the interview where something felt off. You just couldn't explain it — so you set it aside.
This isn't an unusual story. It's actually very common and reflects the same gap: the hiring process didn't use values as a lens.
Skills get someone hired. Values determine whether they stay.
Most hiring processes are built to evaluate competence. Can this person do the job? Do they have the right education and experience? Those are valid questions, but they don't measure "fit."
People talk about how important culture is in their organization, but they don't evaluate how a candidate will fit; mostly because they don't know how to do it (other than intuition which they often ignore).
A bad culture fit can destroy culture and unravel a team quickly. It's not that they are a bad employee (in fact the most dangerous employees to a culture are ones who don't fit the culture, but nail the metrics). When they don't fit into your culture, it is because they are not aligned with your values which means they operate from a different set of assumptions about how work gets done, how conflict gets handled, how mistakes get owned. That misalignment, compounded over time, is a huge liability.
The solution is simpler than most leaders think: use your values as a hiring filter. Screen for competence and culture — most hiring managers have the competence part covered. The gap is almost always on the values side.
The challenge is that you can only screen for what you've actually defined.
Vague values aren't a filter
Most organizations have values. And most of those values look something like: integrity, innovation, collaboration, excellence. Words that sound right, mean well, and could apply to virtually anyone.
Your values need to act as directions for how people should act, which means you need to define what that looks like in your organization. What behaviours do you expect to see if someone is aligned (and conversely, what behaviours indicate they are not aligned). These behaviours give you something tangible to hire against.
A quick test: pick one of your values and try to write an interview question around it. Not a generic question — a specific one that would reveal whether a candidate actually lives that value. If you can't write the question, the value isn't defined clearly enough to use.
If that's where you're at, the first step is doing that definition work. Gino Wickman, in his EOS model, puts it simply: hire, fire, reward, recognize and promote based on your values. That's the framework. Your interview questions are how you start building it.
Once you have that, you can actually start hiring with them.
What this looks like in an actual interview
Let's say one of your values is accountability — and you've defined it to mean: you own your mistakes, you don't deflect, you're honest about your role when something goes sideways, you are focused on solving the problem, rather than assigning blame and you are proactive in identifying errors.
Your question might be: "Tell me about a time you made a mistake at work (maybe even a mistake that no one would have noticed). What happened?"
Then listen to their answer. But you aren't listening just to the story, you're listening to how they describe the story in terms of the behaviours you've defined for accountability.
One candidate takes a breath and tells you about a project where they missed a deadline because they underestimated the scope. They noticed before the deadline and approached their supervisor and described the conversation. They got support and ended up meeting the deadline. And they demonstrated how they learned from the situation so that it wouldn't happen again.
Another candidate gives you a similar setup — a mistake, a deadline missed — but the story spends most of its time on context. The timelines were unrealistic, and no one even noticed that they missed the deadline (sigh of relief). They worked all night to get it done though (and they were only a few hours late so it all worked out fine). Their manager praised their excellent job.
In both situations, the work got done (and the client wasn't affected). When you evaluate the stories against accountability, the differences become clear. If you had different values, you might prioritize one situation over the other.
You're not looking for someone with a perfect track record — that's not realistic, and anyone who claims it is probably telling you what they think you want to hear. What you're listening for is how they relate to accountability when they think they're just telling you a story.
That gut feeling has a name
Interviewers often have a nagging feeling like something's off, but they can't articulate what it is. That gut feeling is important information, though. It is your unconscious raising red flags. Without a structure to explain it though, it often gets overridden by the pressure of the open role, the polished resume, the candidate who interviewed well.
When you've done the work to define your values and write questions around them, that feeling starts to make sense. You can look back at your notes and see it — the answer that sounded fine but never quite arrived at ownership, the story where the candidate was always the hero and everyone else was the problem, the moment where their definition of "we got it done" was doing it themselves because they didn't trust anyone else.
The gut feeling doesn't go away; instead you created a framework to explain it (and to help identify those red flags consistently).
Start Small
You don't need to overhaul your entire hiring process this week. Pick one value. Define what it looks like — the specific behaviours you'd expect to see, and the ones that would concern you. Write one question that would draw out a real example. Use it in your next interview and notice what you hear.
That's the starting point.
Then work towards a fuller version: a consistent set of questions across all your values, a clear list of green and red flags for each one, a process that lets you compare candidates against the same criteria. That takes more work to build, and it's worth doing well.
A few questions worth sitting with:
If you pulled out your core values right now, could you write a behavioural interview question for each one?
In your last few hires, did your process actually screen for values — or did it mostly screen for competence?
Is there a hire you're thinking of right now who's technically capable but creating friction you can't quite name?
Your values exist to help you build a team that doesn't just perform — it holds together. But they can only do that if you're actually using them.
