Missing puzzle piece

Someone Might Just be a bad Culture Fit, Too.

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last week, I shared an article and some of my own experiences around “culture fit” being a code for discrimination. We all know that is all too common, and an excuse for organizations to continue to hire “people like us”.

I saw another article over the weekend that reminded us that while that is common, there are some cases where someone is a bad cultural fit and there’s no discrimination involved.

Fired For Not Being a Culture Fit: What To Do

More importantly, the article also contains some advice on how to handle this in future interviews. That could be helpful.

So, yes, employers often use cultural fit as an excuse to not be very diverse in their hiring practices. Sometimes, however, things just aren’t a good fit. I’ve left jobs and turned down interviews for jobs, that weren’t good fits for me. Not jobs I couldn’t do. Jobs I was actually quite good at, but what I wanted for my lifestyle wasn’t a good fit. Traveling all the time? Enjoyed it for a few years, but other factors in my life made it a bad fit. Working in an office all day, every day? Again, enjoyed parts of that, but what I wanted from my life wasn’t compatible. I wasn’t a good fit any longer, so I made the choice to change jobs. Employers can make those choices as well.

As I said last week, hiring a good cultural fit gets us someone who can slide right into our team and contribute. As long as we aren’t using it as an excuse to only hire certain kinds of people, that’s OK.

Similar Posts

  • |

    Linked: How to build a culture of cybersecurity

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    This is the one thing I’ve talked about before when it comes to where we might fall short on our cybersecurity training, we don’t really hold anyone accountable.

    Make cybersecurity part of formal employee evaluation. Give people a reason to care. Much like I talked a couple of weeks ago about creating a training culture, provide a way for people to learn more and to learn from others. Give them space and time to talk about security. Recommend they read some security blogs, meet to share stories about the latest phishing information out there, etc.

  • |

    Linked – The 3 Most Kind Things You Can Say with Someone

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Yes, those are things we should tell our family and friends. They are also 100% the things we should tell employees. What makes a difference for employees other than pay? Knowing that the work they do is appreciated and makes a difference. How will they know if you don’t tell them? How will they know that you notice their effort if you don’t tell them you notice it? 

  • |

    Linked: Women in cybersecurity need more than inspiration

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    What Sherri talks about in regards to the security industry is something I’m seeing over and over again when reading about diversity. The child care question.

    Let me share another resource on the topic with you. In December, there was an episode of People I Mostly Admire with Claudia Goldin, where she talked about the concept of “Greedy work”.

    The topic she was chatting about was the gender pay gap and how much child care contributes to it, and one of the reasons we have a gender pay cap, aside from the percentage that is actually discrimination, is that greedy work doesn’t account for child care, but it pays more. So in many families, they have to make a choice between less pay and the flexibility to equally share the child care. The economics of that don’t usually make sense, so one parent takes on the greedy work to maximize the family income while the other steps back to a more flexible role in order to provide the majority of child care. With social norms being what they are, and the other issues that contribute to a gender pay gap, that most often means the man in a heterosexual couple, and here we are with women being vastly underrepresented in these types of positions.

  • Presentation Tips

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    So, after working onsite at a day long seminar, and watching numerous people give presentations, I have some thoughts naturally. 🙂 If you are presenting using a lapel microphone, let’s try and put that sucker in the middle of your jacket, or even on your tie guys, ok? If you put it on the outside…

  • Shared Links (weekly)

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Best Practices for Organizations to Mitigate Risks in Collaboration Software

    McKinsey report: 62% of workers worry about their mental health

    The way we train AI is fundamentally flawed

    Estate planning means organizing passwords

    Microsoft 365 is going full cop on employees with constant monitoring

    Don’t Let Amazon Spammers Scam Your Grandma this Holiday Season

    Why Start-Up Culture Still Hides Mental Health Struggles

    5 meaningful ways to gift your employees this holiday

    Proportionality: Cost Remains The Bottom Line in eDiscovery

    C’mon! Bates Numbering Native Production is Easy!

    This Is How To Make It Hard To Work With You

    The cult of busy.

    Loneliness Is A Mental Health Issue, Can Technology Help?

  • |

    Reading – 20 Cognitive Distortions and How They Affect Your Life

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Always interesting to come across something from a therapy blog, and see how clearly it plays out in a professional environment. Cognitive Distortions exist everywhere, but they can really hurt you in your career. Take a look at some of the things listed in here and think about how you may be blinded by your…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)