Top 6 IT Culture Fit Questions: How to Avoid the Culture Clash

Hiring managers often say, ”I can teach people skills, but hiring people to work in our culture is more important. I can’t teach that!” These words are so true. So how important is this topic to hiring within IT? It’s critical! Get this right, and employee retention, productivity, and engagement will follow. Get this wrong, and the management nightmare begins. And with that nightmare goes productivity issues, disengagement, and the spread of discontent among your staff and the client users who must interact with your people. Culture clash affects and infects your entire organization.


Additional IT Culture Considerations

In IT, there are additional culture overlays that impact IT as perceived through the optics of the rest of the organization:

• Is IT reactive to the business or proactive business problem solvers?
• Is IT a business maintainer or a business accelerator?
• Is IT a business partner or a cost center and cost drain?
• Is IT a value creator or a value ‘eroder’?
• Is IT equipped with the right business skills to anticipate and innovate to make the business more competitive?

These issues, which all come down to culture and how IT acts, are determined by each individual within IT. How they embrace the operating norms set by IT, person by person will define the operating culture of IT. And we must remember that culture is fragile and can be fractured by one or two wrong hires.

How to Optimize Hiring for ‘Culture Fit’ 

Did you know that employees who are a good culture fit tend to have greater job satisfaction and superior job performance and are more likely to stay with the company?  When a large majority of hiring failures are due to poor culture fit, screening for this quality is key to finding the right employees for your organization.

The Top 6 ‘Culture Fit’ Questions to Ask During Your Next Candidate Interview:

1. What are three things most important to you in a job?

2. Tell me about a time in the last week when you’ve been satisfied, energized, and productive at work. What were you doing?

3. Tell me about a time in the last week when you’ve been dissatisfied, disengaged, energy-depleted, and unproductive at work. What were you doing?

4. What’s the most exciting thing about you that is not on your resume?

5. What would make you choose our company over others?

6. What’s the biggest misconception that your coworkers have about you, and why do they have that misconception?

Are you looking to build the IT department of the future? Download the IT Competency Checklist to help determine if your IT Department is ready to perform at sustainable peak levels.