I recently read an interesting article on research about hiring as cultural matching. The research was done by professor Lauren Rivera, an expert on workplace personnel practices. From 120 interviews with hiring managers, professor Rivera found that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting, it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms.
She showed that cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation: “the shared culture, particularly in the form of lifestyle markers, matters for employer hiring.”
According to Prof. Rivera employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity.
Dangers of hiring for cultural fit were widely discussed in different articles and topics and they can be recognized as: cultural similarity to firm, cultural similarity to self and cultural fit before performance.
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