"Culture Fit vs Culture Add": Should We Really Choose One or the Other?In the midst of the Great Resignation and the ever-increasing competition for talent, it’s getting more crucial not only to hire great people but to hire people who will stick around and bring additional value to your organization. And it has been known for a while now that to do that, in addition to the hard job skills you need to take into account other much more intangible qualities.One area that has received much attention in the past 20 years is how the new hire would interact with the company culture. Two related concepts that have been central to many contemporary recruitment strategies are “culture fit” and “culture add.”These are most often viewed as a dichotomy reflecting contradicting values and philosophical approaches towards organizations and culture. However, my experience shows that choosing between those approaches is often a matter of practicality and is dependent on many additional factors.But let’s explore them a bit first and see what all the noise is about.CULTURE FIT OR THE BEER CONUNDRUMCulture fit is a concept that has been around since the 1980s but has gained its multitude of supporters in the last 20 years with the trendsetting tech companies who put their culture in the center of their employer value proposition.Harvard Business Review defines cultural fit as the likelihood that someone will reflect and/or be able to adapt to the core beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that make up a company culture. And all of us who have managed people or even just worked in organizations realize how important this is.Not feeling at home in your team or organization can be a very uncomfortable and exhausting feeling (ask me, I never quite fit the culture in my current workplace). And you would definitely need to have other compelling motivators to stay at a workplace like this.Teams who have shared values and beliefs are much more united and support each other more. Engaging and leading such teams towards a common goal is much easier and straightforward.However, hiring people who think alike and behave alike has its share of risks and downsides too. And the biggest one is the potential for bias.Nearly every article I read while I was researching this post included the cautionary tale of hiring managers ending up selecting people based on whether they would enjoy having a beer with them rather than their actual merit. But even if we do not go that far, being too focused on culture fit may create a blind spot for avoiding diversity.And diversity, in its broadest sense, is essential. Homogenous teams are shown to lack innovation, to avoid conflict and to encourage groupthink. All of which are undesirable for the long-term success of the organization.ENTER “CULTURE ADD”To counteract the bias ‘culture fit” may bring in the recruitment process, the concept of culture add is gaining more and more popularity in recent years.Culture add entails bringing in individuals who will contribute new ideas, values and behaviors. In the more extreme version of this approach, they are also expected to create a certain level of disruption.Research shows that teams with cultural outsid er s are “smarter” and perform better than purely homogenous teams. This is due not only to the new ideas that the newcomer brings. When you interact with someone who thinks differently, you spend more time and effort laying out your visions and thought processes, bringing additional insights.Sounds pretty clear-cut, right? If you want smarter, better-performing teams and want to be innovative and inclusive, you need to hire for culture add.Well, the truth is that this same research also shows that heterogeneous teams also feel more uncomfortable, and their subjective experience is of being less efficient.The truth also is that life is much messier than organizational theories and that people management involves managing some specific people to achieve specific business outcomes...