Should You Hire For Culture Or Train For It?

In brief

Once your culture’s behaviors have names, you can tell which ones a new hire needs to bring and which ones you can teach.
A candidate who only partly shows a behavior isn’t automatically out. You can see the gap in the interview and plan their onboarding around it.
Training for a behavior only works if it teaches your company’s version of it.

Once a company starts hiring for behavior, a new question shows up fast. What do you do with the candidate who has the skills and shows some of the behaviors you need, but not all of them?

Most hiring teams handle it one of two ways. They pass, because the person “isn’t quite there.” Or they hire anyway and hope it works out. One throws away a good candidate. The other leaves the result to luck.

There’s a better question to ask: is this something we have to hire for, or something we can train for?

Years ago I took over an HR department that needed a recruiter. The person in the role had moved on, and I don’t think recruiting was what she really wanted to do. I’ve done recruiting myself, so I understand how that happens.

I interviewed a lot of candidates. I wasn’t interviewing for culture back then, and most people answered the questions about the same way. One candidate answered them too, but something was different. She was more passionate about recruiting than anyone I had ever met, and you could feel it in the room.

I hired her, and people loved her. She filled hard-to-fill roles, sometimes on her own and sometimes through an agency. What people noticed most was how she treated them. She talked to hiring managers like customers. When she disagreed with someone, she didn’t reach for the policy or the law to make her point. She’d tell them she would get back to them, talk it through with me, and then go back with an answer. Other parts of HR leaned on the rules, and people heard that as HR policing them. They never heard it from her.

She also knew when to bring me in. Some calls belonged to her manager, and she brought those to me instead of making them on her own. Some people avoid that because they want to look competent. The most competent people I’ve worked with engage the right person at the right time.

I didn’t teach her any of that. The only thing I trained her on was how we did recruiting here.

Looking back, I got lucky. I hired for something I couldn’t name, and it happened to be what the job needed most. The part I could teach, I taught.

You can only decide once the behavior has a name

This question doesn’t work while your culture is still a list of values on the wall. You can’t decide whether “collaboration” is trainable. It’s too vague to hire for or to train for.

It works once your culture’s personality is named and turned into specific behaviors, with a bar for each level of the organization. That’s what hiring for a culture you’ve actually named sets up. Then the interview gives you something real to work with: this candidate shows one behavior clearly, another partly, a third not at all.

Now you can sort.

What to hire for

Some behaviors are hard to teach in the time a new hire has to get up to speed. They tend to be the ones closest to how a person approaches work in general. My recruiter treated the people she served as customers. I couldn’t have built that in a training session, and in a department whose job was to serve, it belonged in the hiring decision.

The question I ask now: if this person doesn’t bring it with them, will the job fail no matter what we teach? If the answer is yes, hire for it.

What to train for

Other behaviors are about how things are done here. How decisions get escalated. How feedback gets given. How a customer complaint gets handled. A strong candidate from another company may do all of these well, in a different way. That gap isn’t in the person. It’s in what they’ve been shown so far.

Those you can train for, and it’s often the better call. The alternative is waiting for a candidate who already happens to work exactly the way you do, and that candidate may not exist.

See the gap before day one

A lot of companies, mine included, have used the first 90 days as the real test. You hire, you watch, and if it isn’t working you let the person go before it turns into an unemployment claim. I’ve done it.

There’s a better test, and it happens before the offer. Ask the technical questions, and also ask how this person would work in your company. When you can see the gap in the interview, you already know what they need to learn, so their onboarding is mapped before they start. You close the gap on purpose instead of waiting to see what happens.

I’ve hired plenty of people who didn’t have every skill and trained them to it. What most companies skip is training people to the culture.

Train to your version

This is where most companies lose the advantage they just created. They decide to train for a behavior, then send the new hire to a generic course on communication or leadership. The course teaches communication in general. Your company communicates in its own way. So the new hire learns the course, comes back, and watches what everyone around them actually does.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that, and I wrote about why training doesn’t change behavior.

If you’re going to train for it, train to your company’s version. Show what the behavior looks like here, at their level, with examples from your own people. That’s the version that sticks, because it’s the version your culture rewards.

Making the call

Hire for the behaviors the job can’t survive without. Train for the ones that are really about how you do things. And make sure both lists come from a culture you’ve named, so the decision rests on something everyone in the interview room can see. Here’s how that works in recruiting.

Start here

Know what to hire for and what to train for

Both lists start with naming your culture’s personality. The Culture Quiz gives you a first read in a few minutes.

Take the Culture Quiz

Frequently asked questions

Should you hire for culture fit or for skills?

Ideally both. Skills tell you whether someone can do the tasks. Named behaviors tell you whether they’ll do them the way your company works. “Culture fit” on its own usually means each interviewer’s gut feeling, which is why it’s so unreliable.

Can you teach culture to new employees?

You can teach the behaviors when they’re specific. A new hire can learn how your company handles feedback or a customer complaint. What’s hard to teach is a general approach to work that runs against how your company operates.

What’s the difference between soft skills and behaviors?

Soft skills are general: communication, leadership, delegation. Behaviors are specific to your company: what communication looks like here, at this level.

How do you decide whether to hire for something or train for it?

Ask whether the job fails if the person doesn’t bring it with them. If it does, hire for it. If it’s about how things are done at your company, train for it, and plan that training before their first day.

Is the first 90 days a good test of a new hire?

It tells you late. By then you’ve spent three months finding out something a good interview could have shown you. If you interview for how someone will work at your company, you can see the gap early and build their onboarding around it.