Hiring for culture fit feels like common sense.

You want your people to get along: share the same values, speak the same language, move in step with each other.

At first, it does feel like magic. Decisions flow easily. Meetings run smoothly. Everyone nods at just the right moments, and the workplace hums with harmony.

But give it long enough, and you start seeing a pattern. People start to sound the same, think the same, act the same. Every conversation begins to echo the last. Instead of challenging each other, people validate each other. Instead of calling out our biases, they reinforce them.

In a culture that murmurs the same ideas over and over, every challenge, no matter how well-meaning, feels like an existential threat. Every dissent feels like betrayal. An opinion that doesn’t conform is met with a soft smile and a sharp kill: “Well, that’s not how we do things around here.”

This isn’t fit. It’s an echo chamber built one hire at a time.

The fiction of fit

When most companies hire for fit, what they really hire for is familiarity. They may say they want a shared purpose, but what they really want is a shared personality.

When we confuse unity with uniformity, hiring works much like a Xerox machine. It mass-produces duplicates where each new hire is a lower-resolution copy of the last. Each “perfect fit” absorbs — and then reinforces — the same cultural grammar.

The more the copies, the fewer the perspectives. The fewer the perspectives, the quieter the dissent. The quieter the dissent, the stronger the delusion.

Culture of today vs culture of tomorrow

The deeper problem isn’t that organisations misunderstand fit. It’s that they misunderstand culture itself.

Culture isn’t something we have. It’s somewhere we live. It’s something we do. It’s a never-ending negotiation between differences. Between what is and what could be. Between familiar ideas that have stood the test of time and new ones whose time has come.

So, the more we hire for cultural fit as it exists today, the more we prevent it from becoming what it needs to be tomorrow. The more we feed it the sameness of the present, the more we starve it of the newness of the future.

Cues for action

• Instead of asking “Do they share our mindset?”, ask: “Will they stretch our thinking in ways we wouldn’t on our own? Will they help us see what we’re taking for granted, while keeping us anchored in our roots?”

• Instead of asking “Do they see the world the way we do?”, ask: “Will they help us see the world more deeply, more clearly, more truthfully?”

• Instead of asking “Will we get along?”, ask: “Will they question us in ways that improve our character? Will they challenge us in ways that make us wiser? Will they deepen trust, not by keeping the peace, but by helping us see what’s worth fighting for?”

• Instead of asking “Do they align with who we are?” ask: “Will they respect who we are, while helping us become who we need to be? Will they honour what we’ve built, while making space for what’s next?”

We do need people who fit. But we also need people who stretch us. We do need those who share our views, but also those who widen our lenses. That’s how we build a culture that’s brave enough to adapt and strong enough to evolve.