This point seems to be coming up in my job a lot at the
moment – people with excellent technical profiles being rejected for roles
because of ‘culture fit’, or bright people being rejected because they don't quite fit a job spec.
I thought it might make an interesting post, especially
off the back of a point I mentioned in my last post, made by Mazz Mosley when
she spoke at PrimeConf last month (about what qualities should be important
triggers in the decision to promote someone to a leadership role).
Should the person adapt to the job, or the job to the
person? How important are hard skills, tech, experience, and how do they weigh
in compared to attitude and personality; culture fit?
These are challenges many companies face every day, both
when they hire new staff and when they direct existing staff. It’s also a
challenge technical people face when they interview, many finding that their
technical skills can easily stagnate unless they stay fluid in the job market.
If you work at a company that uses a specific set of technologies but not, say,
angularJS (which, for better or worse, everyone
wants right now… that’s a whole other post…) then you might find it hard to
move on to a company using angular. Increasingly, candidates are looking for
new roles where they can learn new tech, whilst companies only want to hire
people who have already been using this tech.
In some cases – when work needs to be delivered quickly, or
expansion is so rapid that it’s hard to find training time, or there’s simply
nobody able to train staff internally, for example in an early stages start-up –
then of course I can see how there is a need for somebody who brings
significant experience.
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| Courtesy of Dorothy Dalton |
In other cases, however, the decision to look at the technical
profile and not the person can lead to hiring mangers missing out on an
excellent developer because they are limited by that person’s last job role. It’s
something that recruiters get accused of a lot (only looking at the last job
role or tech skill, not the person’s complete history/aptitude to learn), but
actually I think technical hiring managers can lack that vision too.
Another argument is that, if you only ever hire people with
the same skills, you’ll only ever have the same skills in your team… and that’s
not good in a market which is evolving fast and competitively. A senior contact
of mine recently made this point actually – he’s interviewing currently, and
noted that many companies focus too much on the user interaction, (which doesn't
translate well into larger systems development and delivery) whilst many others
have the opposite problem of not understanding digital and customer experience at all. Few companies are getting the balance. He could have brought a huge amount of wider systems knowledge into a frontend-focussed creative agency, for example, but they only wanted someone with an existing agency background.
In an ideal world...
Personally I think that talented people are at the crux of
any successful business plan and so, in an ideal world, you would hire good
people first and allow them to define the direction your business takes. You
would use the technology that makes most sense for the job, not just the one
you were last using. If your employees are talented then they would be able and
willing to learn the best tool for the job. Culture fit is a difficult one to
pin down, but in my experience if people fail here it is often to do with their
ability and desire to learn, or how open-minded they are about trying something
a different way. The best companies I work with - or at least the ones who perform consistently above their competitors, who can attract the top 5% of developers and whose developers do not want to leave - create this kind of culture and business model.
