Mecca Mitchell still shudders when she remembers an onboarding experience at an old job. Now the SVP of equity and inclusion at Burlington Stores, Mitchell recalls it took just one week for a feeling of dread to sink in. “I remember sitting at my desk, with my head in my hand, saying, Dear God, what did I do?” she recounted during a recent From Day One webinar about keeping both diversity and corporate values in mind when hiring workers. “And it was because the onboarding was so incredibly awful. I mean, everything from just people who were there to receive me to paperwork to conversations about what comes next and the organization.”

That first week left a first impression that took a long time for Mitchell to unwind. Essentially, she sensed a fundamental disconnect between the company’s purported culture and values and the company’s ability to put them into practice.

We’re at an inflection point in talent acquisition and retention, where hiring for culture fit is now a relic of the past, even though a great many managers still cling to it. What forward-thinking companies want to pursue instead is talent that brings both a “culture add” and a “values fit.” 

What Makes ‘Culture Fit’ an Obsolete Notion

In an era when employers are striving to do better on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), recruiting only people who look they they will fit into the current corporate culture looks like a regressive idea. “A culture fit is not a bad thing, but it sets in motion a cascade that makes us narrow,” said Scott Nycum, VP of diversity, inclusion, and giving for the professional-service consultancy General Dynamics Information Technology.

“A culture fit has always meant, ‘Are we hiring them to reflect who we are currently, someone who behaves in ways that are familiar to us?’” said Salima Bhimani, who is chief strategist  and director of equity, inclusion, and systemic change for the Other Bets at Google. “There’s a pressure that comes from the top to have this kind of culture fit.” Culture add, by contrast, represents a shift in emphasis. “We should be looking for people who are bringing in perspectives, but the challenge is that in both cases we don’t necessarily ask the question whether the culture per se is where it should be,” Bhimani said. “We probably interview a bunch of people who are talented but didn’t really fit. That’s our loss,” said Nycum.

“When you’re looking at values,  you’re looking at underlying behaviors you want to drive. You have to understand values are deeper than personality, and these are things that are hard to assess in a job interview,” said Chad Lafferty, VP of global sales of the AI-powered employee analytics service Attuned. “Some of our bias comes from what we like, and this creates pockets of unhealthy culture. We need to break away from that; we need to change how we think of the interview process.”

Leading With Values

One of the essential responsibilities of leaders is to be cultural architects. “That’s their role,” said Mitchell, who sees leaders as builders of a well-intentioned and energized workforce. “If you have toxic leaders, it all falls apart. Leadership is informed by investors, constituents; leaders have to take ownership over their roles.”

All this values-based talk might sound like a new concept, but not for those who have long worked in equity and inclusion circles. “At Burlington we lead with our values. I think it’s part of that evolution to break out of the mold. The unconscious bias is that we want people who remind us of ourselves,” said Mitchell. “I am a lawyer–I always say that with lawyer candidates, I have affinities for them.”

The bigger the company, the harder it is to determine who should set the values to emulate. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, for example, has more than 150,000 employees. “I think we need to start with leaders having that conversation because people are looking to leaders to say, ‘Hey, are you emulating the thing that you say is really, really important?’ Now, I think that that’s a starting point,” said Bhimani. “But I think that leaders have to gut check that with their current talent pool of people that they have within the organization, because there might be a mismatch between expectations and reality.”

Leadership, however, does not necessarily hold all the power. Now more than ever, interviews have become a two-way street. “Leadership sets the values, but you have to have buy-in from the top all the way through. Everyone you hire has to be bought into these values,” said Nycum. Candidates want to see how managers live by the values they profess. 

Ensuring the Application of Values in the Hiring Process

Research has shown that in interviewing and onboarding, extrinsic motivation alone doesn’t work. “The thing is, we tend to structure the interview and offer a process around extrinsic motivation,” said Lafferty, rather than getting at what motivates people from within. A related issue is that values are abstract until they’re made real. Nycum has a playbook for that. “Accessing the values part of someone’s brain has to be a practical set of questions,” he said. Questions can go along the lines of, “Think about a time when you were in an environment where you did your best work. Unpack it: When were you motivated and ran through the next challenge?”

 “It’s almost a coaching session. It can be incredibly powerful,” said Nycum. “I want someone to be self-reflective; I never want a gotcha question. We need a novel question in service of someone unpacking something, unrehearsed. We can crack open the next door and then get to reality as fast as possible.” 

Yet organizations cannot fully set extrinsic motivation aside, especially with candidates from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds. “If you’re not getting paid well, you’re not gonna take it,” said Mitchell. “We have to be careful who we’re talking about. With intrinsic motivation, when we don’t have managers and leaders who are prepared, we can end up in the same situation all over again.” 

The speakers agreed that onboarding does not end with the candidate’s first day on the job. “Onboarding is not a week-long process, it’s not a 30-day process, it’s a 360-day process, because, especially if you’re an underrepresented person, we have to think of it as a long-term investment in that person,” said Bhimani. “From the data we see, people who don’t have the support in the first year, they’ll leave.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Boston.