Hiring for personality fit is a trap

Every hiring manager says that they want the best person for the job. Yet many are still hiring people who remind them of themselves. I know, because it’s a mistake that I made myself.

Sociologist Lauren Rivera spent months inside elite firms’ hiring committees and found evaluators consistently rated candidates on shared hobbies, schools and self-presentation ahead of technical or leadership ability. Not (necessarily) because they were biased, but because they genuinely believed that similarity predicted competence. ‘They’re like me, so will perform like I do.’

Yet, as I know through my own experience, this doesn’t always prove to be true. In many ways it’s a trap. All it does is to predict sameness, and sameness is exactly what a team doesn’t need.

A manager that keeps hiring for personality fit narrows the team over time until every dissenting voice has either left or feels like it is no longer safe to speak up. By the time that shows up in the performance data, it appears to be a talent or attitude problem rather than the hiring one that caused it.

Personality fit is still important, however, it’s diversity of thought that adds the greatest value, rather than the comfort question of ‘would I enjoy a drink with this person?’ That’s a reasonable basis for a friendship but it’s a poor basis for a hiring decision, and a worse reason to reject a stronger candidate who simply thinks differently to the rest of the room.

It’s much better to hire for what someone can add to a team than what they confirm about it. At 3 months in, you could ask a candidate what they’d change about how your team works, not whether they’d fit into it unchanged. The answer that they give you will tell you far more and greatly enhance the way you operate.