‘Culture fit’ has become one of the most abused phrases in recruitment. Used well, it captures something genuinely important: whether a candidate can work effectively within a business’s norms, values and ways of working. Used lazily — which is most of the time — it becomes a proxy for familiarity, homogeneity, and sometimes conscious or unconscious bias. At senior level, where the stakes of a wrong decision are highest and the assessment process is most opaque, it does more harm than good.
The Problem with ‘Fit’
When hiring managers assess for culture fit, they are typically asking some version of: would I enjoy working with this person? Do they feel like one of us? The problem with this question is that it optimises for comfort rather than capability. People who feel like “one of us” are often similar to the people already in the room — in background, in outlook, in approach. That similarity is comfortable, but it is not correlated with performance or with the business’s actual needs.
In practice, the best senior hires are often people who are meaningfully different from the current leadership team in ways that are valuable — different commercial approaches, different market experiences, different problem-solving styles. Hiring for fit actively screens those people out.
Culture Add: A Better Framework
Culture add asks a different question: what does this person bring to the team and the business that isn’t there today, and is that difference valuable? This requires a more deliberate articulation of what the culture actually is — what values and behaviours are genuinely non-negotiable, versus what’s simply a reflection of how things have always been done. It separates the essential from the historical.
The non-negotiables are real and should be assessed rigorously. A business built on honesty, pace and commercial discipline needs leaders who genuinely share those values — and who will model them visibly for the team. A candidate whose instincts are towards opacity, deliberation and relationship management at the expense of commercial outcomes is a genuine culture risk, regardless of their technical credentials.
But many of the things treated as culture requirements are actually preferences — ways of working that have evolved because of the current team’s composition, not because of what the business genuinely needs. Surfacing that distinction is one of the most valuable services a specialist recruiter can provide in a senior search.
What Good Culture Assessment Looks Like
Good culture assessment at senior level is structured, not instinctive. It involves explicit discussion of the business’s values and the behaviours that evidence them, with examples requested from the candidate. It involves reference conversations with people who have worked closely with the candidate in different contexts — not just those the candidate has selected, but those who can provide a rounded view. And it involves honest self-reflection from the hiring team about what they’re actually assessing and why.
We’re happy to discuss our approach to culture assessment on any senior search assignment.
