If you spend any time giving interviews (or much time going through the interview process, honestly), you’ll probably start to hear people talking about “culture fit.” The amount of people that obsess over the concept boggles the mind.

And it’s the wrong thing to do. In fact, it can be actively harmful to not only the person interviewing for the position, but even the company they’re interviewing at.

“Culture fit” as it’s practiced in a lot of places leads to one of two things:

• An unintentional monoculture where everyone looks, thinks and acts the same
• A thinly veiled reason to discriminate against people (which, in turn, leads to a monoculture where everyone looks, thinks and acts the same, only it’s done on purpose)

If you think I’m blowing the discrimination part of things out of proportion, ask a Black person how many times they’ve heard that they “weren’t a good fit” for a role that they were extremely qualified for. Or, if you’re in the mood to hear me rant, ask me why I grew a beard and how I literally started getting offers consistently within a few weeks.

Yes, the people on your team need to work well together. That’s a given. That doesn’t mean that they need to “fit” into your current culture. In fact, maybe your current culture is toxic or otherwise sucks and it’s holding you back.

Don’t hire for Culture Fit. Hire for Culture Add.

Looking for what someone can add to the culture of the team actively works against forming a monoculture because you are explicitly looking for someone who doesn’t think like everyone else on the team and probably has a vastly different background.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people over the course of my career. My basic checklist is as follows:

• Do I think they can do the job (or grow into it in a reasonable amount of time)?
• Are they an asshole? (the answer to this should probably be no)
• Do I think they can get along with the team, clients, etc fairly well?
• What would them working with us add to the team that we don’t already have or don’t have enough of?
• What problems would adding them cause? (This is mostly so I can make myself aware of potential issues within my existing team and is a way to be aware of possible pre-existing biases)

Seriously. That’s probably 95% of what I’m gauging when I give an interview. All of the questions I ask; all of the time I spend actively listening to what’s going on in the interview; all of it – it’s all to answer at least one of the above questions.

I don’t want a team full of people that look, talk, act, and think like me. Are you kidding? That sounds like hell on earth – not to mention practically impossible given the demographics that I fall into.

A team full of clones of me would drive me nuts and would cause me to stagnate because I wouldn’t be introduced to new things in an organic manner nearly as often. It’s not that I’m a bad person. It’s that I know that I have the habit of following things down rabbit holes unless I catch myself doing it. I like being around people who are different from me because it gives me the chance to look at things from different angles.

Could I use an extra “me” around once in a while? Sure. But a team or company full of copies of me would be like the scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where Jack Sparrow is in Davey Jones‘ Locker and the entire crew of the ship is copies of him.

I have strengths, but I also have weaknesses and I realize it. So do you. Having a diverse team helps the team be stronger because where one person is weak, another member of the team may be strong.

Monocultures don’t get that benefit (or at least not to nearly the same extent) and both the members of the team and the company suffer for it.

Don’t believe me? Look at the motion activated faucets that don’t work well for people with darker skin, products that aren’t accessible to people with disabilities, facial recognition software for photographs that crop the image to lighter colored faces, etc. All of these things (and more) could be mitigated by having a more diverse group of people working on the products in question.

Diversity isn’t a checklist activity. It’s something that makes us all stronger. Throw culture fit out the window and go for culture add. You’ll be better off.

For most of my career, I’ve heard businesses saying that “short resume entries” are a Red Flag in a candidate. It seems to be a little bit less common of a mindset on the east and west coasts than it is in the Midwest (probably because of the startup heavy markets on the coasts). In the last few years, it’s even become less of an issue because of market pressures (which I consider a good thing).

There are a number of problems with this particular “red flag” mindset. First among them is that everyone has a different definition of “short resume entry”. For some people, a couple of 3 month entries set off their alarm bells. For others, anything less than a year is “short”. I’ve even known some people who I would consider to be amazingly out of touch that consider 2-3 years as “short”.

In addition to the fact that nobody knows what “short” is to somebody else, the person yelling “red flag!” has absolutely no idea why the person left that job (and, honestly, in a lot of cases, it’s none of their business). A so-called short entry on a resume could indicate:

• A person found themselves at a bad company.
• They do a lot of consulting.
• They get significantly better offers on a regular basis.
• The company that hired them experienced financial problems and had to lay people off.
• Any number of other things.

We’ll use a couple of examples from my own resume to illustrate this.

I was at one of my positions less than a year because they were a consulting company and one of their largest clients cut their staffing levels extremely hard due to economic externalities (I could explain the effect of falling commodities prices on an agriculture equipment corporation, but I don’t want to bore you). This was such a concerning character flaw on my part that I’ve been contacted by one of the C-level officers that I worked with there to see if I would be interested in joining his new venture.

At another position, I was on staff for less than a year because I was working on a government contract with a set end date and I knew that going in. I was an FTE for the company I worked for, but we knew it was uncertain whether or not I would be staying.

As the contract was ending, my director-level boss started talking to all of the other divisions in the company to see if there were remote positions that I could join because they were so happy with my work. I’ve since been contacted by the company in question two more times to see if I was interested in joining them again. The first time didn’t work out for literal political reasons. We’re currently waiting to see about the second time.

The hilarious thing is that I’ve had hiring managers give feedback that they liked me but considered me a flight risk based on those two entries on my resume. I know I’m not the only one with similar experiences in that regard.

Let’s call this out for what it really is – fear and insecurity on the part of companies who are looking for basically any reason why a candidate might not be the “perfect” fit. They want to feel like they have all of the power and that the candidates should be perfectly loyal and, in the words of several hiring managers I’ve known, “stay around for a long time.”

I’ve been on both sides of the interview table, so I understand what they think the motivation is for saying that. Hiring is stressful for everyone (though the company has a lot more power than they try to act like they do) and making a bad hire sucks (though it’s not as catastrophic for most companies as they pretend). However, 90%+ of the time, the reason for a short resume entry is because of the company the person was working for, not because of anything “wrong” with the person themselves.

The candidate doesn’t have any control over whether or not your company culture is toxic. They don’t have control over your finances. They don’t control how you pay in relation to other companies or your lack of focus on continuing professional development. That’s all on your company.

Let’s be honest, the majority of the risk taken on in a working relationship is taken by the employee and not the company. The employee is almost always going to be in a worse position if the company ends their relationship than a company will be if an employee gives their notice. This means that, most of the time, if there’s a short entry on someone’s resume that person has a really good reason that it didn’t last long.

You need to realize and accept this. When you do, you can work to mitigate those “flight risk” factors by giving people a reason to stay instead of giving them reasons to leave.

Employers – Accept that, at some point, almost any employee can and will leave if given reason to do so. You don’t own the people that work for you, and too many managers try to act like employees owe their lives and loyalty to the company.

I’d argue against asking candidates why entries on their resume are “short” because it’s often none of your business, can surface things that have legal consequences for you (in the case of them being discriminated against based on a protected class for instance), or may even cause the person trauma by making them relive past incidents. If you absolutely feel that you must ask someone why they have short entries on their resume, use it as a lesson in what you need to avoid doing as a company so you don’t lose your people the same way and not as a reason to disqualify them.

Employees – Don’t put up with toxic environments and realize that it’s okay to act with a sense of enlightened self-interest if a much better opportunity comes along. Life is too short to give loyalty to people who don’t deserve it (especially if they’re using it to exploit you).