Back in 2008, we published the New York Times bestseller Who: The A Method for Hiring. Our thesis was simple: Too many leaders spend too much time and energy chasing solutions to “What” problems when “Who”– or having the right people in the right roles – is what quietly drives results. We laid out a straightforward process for transforming hiring from an art to a science.

One of the thorniest hiring challenges is to nail down whether a candidate will be a cultural fit. It’s a story we’ve heard countless times – the candidate who looked great on paper and cruised through the interview process, but whose promise unraveled within months of their start date. Estimates vary by role and industry, but anywhere from 20% to 50% of new hires fall short of expectations at best or flame out entirely in their first year.

We understand that cultural fit can often be deprioritized when you’re desperate to fill a particularly hard-to-hire-for role. There’s also the dangerous temptation to over-estimate a potential hire’s ability to adapt to your culture – you tell yourself, for example, that their rare domain expertise trumps all else and they can be coached on the softer aspects of what it takes to have impact in your organization. But those softer aspects tend to be relatively hard-wired, particularly at more senior levels, where leaders have had decades to develop deeply entrenched working styles, communication patterns, and decision-making approaches that become increasingly difficult to reshape.

So keep your eye on the long term and don’t lose sight of just how painful and costly hiring mistakes can be – avoiding cultural misalignment can save you time, money, and all the other headaches that come with turnover and organizational churn. More broadly, hiring is one of the most important levers you have for embedding and operationalizing culture (along with onboarding, manager behaviors, and incentives, among others). Ensuring new hires not only fit with but model your culture helps to make it self-sustaining. The same goes for a culture in transition, where new hires can be part of shaping the culture you want rather than just replicating the culture you already have.

Clearly, understanding whether a candidate will be a cultural fit should be an essential part of any hiring process. The tricky part is doing the evaluation in a data-driven way. After all, the defining characteristics of an organizational culture tend to be relatively subjective and abstract – the words we use to describe what we care about can mean different things to different people and in different contexts. Entrepreneurial in investment banking isn’t the same as entrepreneurial in property and casualty insurance, and customer-centric can mean something very different in a B2B context than it does in a retail environment.

The key here is to move from the subjective and abstract to the objective and observable by focusing on the behaviors that translate into results in your unique organizational context.

While behaviors can be challenging to describe as well, you can gather data about behaviors in a way that you can’t about subjective or abstract traits – behaviors tell you if someone actually walks the talk. Focusing on behaviors also helps guard against bias. We recognize that certain behaviors are shaped by an individual’s background, but it’s still harder to project your assumptions onto a person when the observable data doesn’t line up with your preconceptions.

And once you know the behaviors that lead to cultural fit in your organization, you can build them into your hiring process. Which brings us to Step 1….

Step 1: Define the behaviors that add up to cultural fit

So how exactly do you figure out the behaviors that add up to cultural fit?

One way to start is by looking at the biggest mishires your organization has made over the last few years – not to torture yourself, but to shine a bright light on what didn’t work. In some cases, the issue will be immediately clear. Maybe it was the meticulous engineer who excelled at identifying operational efficiencies but whose painstaking pace was out of sync in a culture that prizes speed over precision. Or the visionary technology leader with an ambitious strategy for harnessing AI to transform business processes but who over-estimated his colleagues’ appetite and readiness for change.

You could also take a more top-down approach and look at how the people who succeed behave across key behavioral dimensions. Take communication, for example: Do they rely on Slack, email, or texts? Schedule meetings or drop by unannounced? Keep doors open or closed? At one client, five different leaders cited the same example of cultural fit – simply stopping to say hello at the coffee machine.

Or consider decision making. Who has a voice, a vote, or a veto? Do people handle disagreements head-on or take them offline? We’ve seen cultures where hashing out issues as a group is routine, no matter how loud and fractious it might get. We’ve also seen cultures where public debate is a major don’t and people resolve conflict in private – or discreetly manage around it.

And what about pace? What does moving fast mean in your organization? Are people expected to respond within the hour or the day or the week? And how about accountability? What happens when someone doesn’t deliver on their objectives? Is there an appetite for risk and a willingness to make it safe for people who aim high but fall short? Or is there no margin for error?

Just to up the degree of difficulty, you’ll also want to factor in whether your cultural reality is everything you want it to be for the foreseeable future (i.e., something to preserve and strengthen), or if your culture is more of a work in progress that needs to evolve to support your strategy. If the latter, take time to define your “destination culture” – where you’re headed, why, and how it enables your strategic priorities – so you can determine the behaviors that will move you closer to your ultimate aspirations without being too far from the norm – the ones that will help your culture bend rather than break.

Once you have a handle on the behaviors you’re looking for, you can integrate them into your hiring process. Which brings us to Step 2….

Step 2: Make cultural fit – and the corresponding behaviors – integral to the role scorecard

If you’re familiar with our work, you know that pretty much all roads at ghSMART begin and end with scorecards. A scorecard for a role isn’t a job description or spec. Instead, it explicitly defines success for the role, including both the “what” and the “how” (in terms of outcomes and leadership and management competencies). The scorecard then serves as the objective yardstick for evaluating candidates, and weaving in the behaviors you’re looking for creates a forcing mechanism for evaluating cultural fit.

As an example, we work with a private equity firm that specializes in operationally-intensive manufacturing businesses. Picture big factories with heavy equipment, fast-moving production lines, and hazardous raw materials and byproducts – in other words, environments that require thoughtful risk management to avoid potentially nasty outcomes. And the very first item on every scorecard for this client is safety, sending an unmistakable message that they value safety above all else.

The “what” and the “how” of the scorecard then detail the requisite safety-related behaviors. For operations roles, that’s typically establishing clear safety policies and standards, investing in safety training and education, upgrading processes and controls to eliminate deviations from best practices, rigorous monitoring and auditing of safety-related KPIs – all the ingredients that contribute to a safety-first culture.

And that insistent focus on safety extends beyond operational roles. For a CFO, the safety outcome on their scorecard could be about providing timely, accurate KPIs for safety dashboards and crunching the numbers to get out ahead of leading indicators of potential safety challenges. For a sales leader, it might mean working with customers to ensure that their orders can be filled on-time and in-full without compromising safety practices.

And once you’ve integrated behaviors into your scorecard, you’re ready for Step 3….

Step 3: Interview for behavioral data to assess cultural fit

A lot of financial products come marked with a warning that “past performance does not guarantee future performance.” We believe the opposite is true with people – the most likely predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and what it reveals about the individual’s underlying mindset and value system.

So when you interview candidates, focus on understanding what they did and how they did it – which is another way of saying to focus on their behaviors. If you ask a hypothetical question (“How would you handle X, Y, or Z?”), you’re going to get a hypothetical answer. Instead, we recommend going deep with candidates on a few accomplishments as well as “do-overs” or mistakes from each role rather than going broad but shallow, and double and triple-click until you have a vivid picture of their actual behaviors.

Additionally, start your discussion of each previous role by asking candidates to describe the organization’s culture. How would they characterize it? What resonated, and what didn’t? Their answers offer a window into the environments that bring out their best work – and, just as importantly, what frustrates them or feels misaligned

with their values and how they operate. Then compare their descriptions with your own culture as another important indicator of potential fit.

As a case in point, we recently worked with a high-growth software company that was hiring a Chief Growth Officer. Their culture was in transition; the CEO and CHRO were leading the transformation from a scrappy founder-led start-up to a more professionalized organization. They stressed the need for a CGO who could transform the sales function into a “well-oiled machine” built on consistent processes. As they explained, “We can’t keep relying on individual heroics to get deals across the finish line.”

We reflected the behaviors they needed in the scorecard – we even used their exact words where applicable, to capture exactly what they meant. For example, the headline for an outcome about upgrading sales infrastructure and processes read: “Implement a data-driven, disciplined sales machine that delivers predictable, repeatable revenue streams (vs. relying on individual heroics).”

We then assessed their two finalist candidates. Both had impressive track records in the industry, but Candidate A had played a pivotal role in launching and growing three different companies while Candidate B had spent most of her career working her way up the ranks at a large multinational. The ingoing assumption was that Candidate A’s background was likely to make him a better cultural fit.

When asked about his top accomplishments, Candidate A discussed developing relationships with early adopters that led to “signing some huge clients.” On the flip side, when asked what he would have done differently, he repeatedly pointed to not doing enough “building and operationalizing” and noted that “I should have done more to acquire the talent to support the growth.”

Candidate B also had big customer wins, but the behaviors that drove those wins were very different. In describing one flagship account, she said, “We sat down as a leadership team and built a plan to figure out how we were going to go after it…. We looked at how we needed to support that as a team.” She also described the win as “hugely rewarding”  because it “helped define the model for other accounts – we could replicate it.”

Candidate A might have been a better fit for where our client’s culture had been, but Candidate B’s behaviors more closely paralleled the “what” and “how” we’d embedded into the CGO scorecard and gave us confidence that she was a better fit for where the culture was heading.

Conclusion

The next time you’re bringing in new talent – and well before you start interviewing candidates – consider the following:

1. What are the how and why of your organizational culture – the behaviors and the underlying drivers of those behaviors that result in cultural fit? And if your culture needs to evolve to support your strategy, what does your destination culture look like?
2. Where do those behaviors factor into the specific role you’re trying to fill? How will they be critical to success?
3. How might those behaviors show up in the context of an interview? What questions will you ask to understand what exactly a candidate did and how they did it?

Figuring out cultural fit is never going to be easy – but being clear about the behaviors that drive cultural fit in your organization should dramatically improve the odds that your new hires will thrive.

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Cultural Fit and Hiring: By the Numbers

A recent survey reported 68% of hiring managers believe poor culture fit is the #1 reason new hires fail. On the flip side, 32% of new employees who left within the first 3 months said that company culture was a reason for their departure. And the impact is real: the Society for Human Resource Management estimates that turnover due to poor culture fit can cost an organization 50-60% of the employee’s annual salary in replacement costs.

The challenge isn’t just that cultural disconnects are costly – it’s that they’re maddeningly difficult to spot in advance. Only 15% of companies have defined the key attitudes or behaviors that make their high performers successful, which means most hiring teams are evaluating fit against an undefined standard. And even when warning signs appear during interviews, they’re routinely missed or dismissed. In the same study, 82% of hiring managers admitted that, in hindsight, they had spotted red flags about cultural fit during the interview process – but hired the candidate anyway, often because they prioritized other factors or lacked confidence in their ability to assess fit.

Without a structured, behavioral approach to evaluating cultural alignment, organizations are left relying on gut feel and vague impressions, which helps explain why nearly two-thirds of hiring managers eventually regret their hiring decisions.

For data sources and additional detail, see: Why New Employees Quit | Human Capital Institute, Five Ugly Numbers That You Can’t Ignore – It’s Time to Calculate Hiring Failures | ERE, 5 Culture Fit Hiring Mistakes and How to Fix Them | INOP.AI, Why 33 Percent of New Employees Quit in 90 Days | Psychology Today, Recruiting for Cultural Fit, and Why New Hires Fail (The Landmark “Hiring For Attitude” Study)