Evaluating Culture Fit in Candidates for Top Leadership Positions

After decades of rigorously assessing leaders for development purposes, clients began asking for our help in evaluating incumbent senior executives and candidates in order to inform staffing decisions about top leadership positions. We're often asked how to best evaluate candidates for cultural fit.

At the senior executive level, cultural fit is too important to leave to chance. About 40% of executives who change jobs or get promoted fail in the first 18 months. We've done “autopsies” on failed outside hires, and we've often seen that failure is often due to lack of fit, including poor fit with the hiring company’s culture. Apart from the leader’s inability to fit in, and the hiring management’s effectiveness in helping a new leader fit in, often the cause of a failed hire is that the search firm and outside evaluators do a poor job of assessing the candidate, in general and in relation to fit.

Here are a few pieces of advice we'd offer hiring teams to help increase the success rate of their big-bet staffing decisions:

1.    The evaluation should be robust. Independent evaluators often make the mistake of collecting data exclusively from the candidate. It’s important to also see the candidate as others see him or her. Also, it’s not enough for the search firm to check a few references. The references that people give are notorious for being sugar-coated. To uncover the truth, or at least come close to it, it’s important for the search firm or evaluation specialists to do a bona fide study. We recommend that for a C-level position, 15-20 people get tapped—direct reports, supervisors and board members, former colleagues, and customers.

2.    The scorecard against which a candidate is measured should include not only fit to the job but also fit to the organization. In evaluating candidates for C-level positions, it’s important to measure likelihood of success not only against the major functional criteria of the job but also against cultural success factors that will determine how well candidates are likely to match up to the team they lead, the team they will be a member of, and the  organization. With outside hires, special attention should be paid to the candidate's ability to adapt, a high-level capability that will affect their chances of adjusting to a new organization.

3.    Evaluating the candidate, including culture fit, should be a collaborative process. Each stakeholder involved in the decision-making process will have a slightly different read on the data based upon their role inside or outside the hiring company and based on own experience with the candidate. A high-quality, open and honest discussion among the various interested and informed parties can make all the difference in gauging the candidate accurately.

4.    In assessing cultural fit, it is important not only to consider if candidates can do the job but also who they are as a person—which is material to their ability to adjust to new situations. When we profile a candidate, our interviews often take a brief history of the person’s life—formative influences, core principles instilled in them from a very young age, pre-career experiences as a leader, the quality of their relationships, what they’re like outside of work—because that gives us clues as to who they are as a person. Who you are as a person very much impacts how you lead.

© Kaplan DeVries Inc.