Beyond the Buzzwords: How to Vet for ‘True’ Cultural Fit in Engineering

Hiring the wrong engineer doesn’t just waste time and money—it fractures your team, derails your delivery timelines, builds technical debt, and sucks the life out of your team’s morale before you even realize it.

Having a qualified engineer on your development team is just one piece of what makes a good team member—but even an amazing coder onboard, if they aren’t working well with the rest of your team, they can become a liability to the progress of your projects.

Most hiring processes fail to detect these risks. A recruiter must determine a candidate’s behavioral profile, past experiences, career priorities, and soft skills.

But what if you don’t have the HR resources to properly screen candidates to that extent? This is especially crucial when it comes to IT staffing for engineering teams.

Provato Staffing has staffers with backgrounds in IT and engineering. The Provato team will do the searching, vetting and screening, and bring to you a shortlist of candidates that match your needs in both skills and cultural fit.

See what “cultural fit” really means for engineering, why picking the wrong candidate is expensive for you, how to define your engineering team’s true culture, and what techniques to use to vet for cultural fit.

What Does “Cultural Fit” Really Mean in Engineering?

Cultural fit—especially in IT engineering teams—goes beyond lunchtime get-togethers and buzzwords like “team dynamics”. True cultural fit consists of parts that address what’s needed for a candidate to holistically contribute to the team’s success.

What cultural fit truly means is:

• Value Alignment
• Work-Style Compatibility
• Collaborative Spirit
• Growth Mindset
• Psychological Safety

Value Alignment

Value alignment refers to your candidate having shared fundamental beliefs with the rest of your team including code quality, user impact, rapid iteration, and other factors related to how work gets done.

What Happens with Poor Value Alignment?

When you hire an engineer who doesn’t share these fundamental beliefs, they may try to cut corners or prioritize their own preferences over the intended product outcome. This misalignment leads to a breaking down of team cohesion.

Work-Style Compatibility

The right engineer candidate should also have significant work-style compatibility such as with your team’s approach to communication, feedback, reactions to pacing and pressure, making decisions, and even the kind of management style they like working under.

What Happens with Poor Work-Style Compatibility

When a misaligned engineer candidate is hired, they may not be able to match your team’s pacing or handle well your chosen form of communication—this can lead to tension and the misaligned hire’s inability to carry out their expected duties.

Collaborative Spirit

Your next engineering hire should have a collaborative spirit, a desire to share knowledge, support their team, and contribute to the team’s shared goals. When there’s a project that requires teamwork, they should be open to helping and doing their part.

What Happens with Poor Collaborative Spirit?

If your engineer is misaligned, they may hoard knowledge or be unwilling to help others. This can lead to your team feeling more isolated.

Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is crucial for IT environments and your next hire should be open to learning new things, adapting to new tools, accepting code review feedback, and being willing to refactor for the better. IT can be fast-paced, and an ideal candidate should be ready to meet change positively along with the rest of your team.

What Happens with No Growth Mindset?

Hiring an engineer who lacks a growth mindset can lead to resistance to change, dismissal of feedback, and an attachment to outdated methods of work. This ultimately can slow down innovation.

Psychological Safety

Psychological safety refers to how your next engineering hire feels about speaking up, taking risks, and even failing when in a supportive environment.

What If the Candidate Does Not Feel Psychologically Safe?

A poorly matched engineer may not feel like contributing to discussions or speaking up about problems they find. This often leads to delays in addressing development issues, and more problems during QA or after release which can be more expensive to resolve.

Ensuring your next engineering candidate has all the pieces to be a cultural fit is crucial for success for your candidate, your team, and your company. On the other hand, choosing the wrong candidate can lead to expensive consequences for your organization.

Why Is Getting Culture Fit Wrong Expensive?

Getting the wrong culture fit in engineering can be incredibly expensive, with costs coming in from several angles including: direct turnover costs, productivity loss, cultural debt, quality issues and technical debt, and missed opportunities. These costs aren’t just in terms of money and time, but also the cost in damage to your team’s overall culture.

Direct Turnover Costs

Direct turnover costs refer to an organization having to spend anywhere from 50% to as high as 200% of an employee’s annual salary after factoring in the recruiting fees, and training time.

Then there is also the time that will be lost from having an empty chair while searching for a candidate who is a true cultural fit. There will also be the cost of onboarding and training for the replacement new hire.

Productivity Loss

Productivity loss will occur as misaligned employees can disrupt a team’s sprint velocity and efficiency. A misaligned engineer can be less communicative, which in turn can create a silo, missed sprint commitments, and even delayed product releases.

This can all happen even if you have a superstar engineer, they need to be culturally aligned with the rest of your team to sync their efforts. Ultimately, the cost of lost productivity is slower project completion, which hurts your revenue and potentially your reputation.

Cultural Debt

Cultural debt refers to how your team accumulates unresolved negative norms, behaviors amongst team members, and/or misalignments that lead to a degrading of your team’s performance.

When there is a poor cultural fit within the team, such as an individual who’s a genius at coding but regularly shows toxic behavior, it can lead to worsening morale, a lack of psychological safety, higher turnover rate, and dysfunctional collaboration.

As you can see, the costs of cultural debt have a little overlap with direct turnover costs and lost productivity. But cultural debt is harder to fix as it directly affects the overall culture and integrity of your team. It can take a long time to repair cultural debt, so it’s always best to avoid it.

Quality Issues and Technical Debt

Quality issues and technical debt arise from poor cultural fits as it can lead to poor development and testing practices, which heighten the risk of bugs, hard-to-maintain cowboy code, and defects that will require time and money to fix later on. This technical debt additionally hurts the confidence of your clients and damages the morale of your team.

Missed Opportunities

A wrong culture hire can also lead to the hidden cost of missed opportunities. From the time spent finding a better hire to the time wasted when there could’ve been innovation and completing projects, each of these is a chance that your organization could’ve been generating revenue or securing new clients.

Provato Staffing sees this often happen when a company prioritizes skills over team alignment. Our thorough process ensures that any candidates from us offer both high-quality skills as well as cultural fit. Like a car without all its wheels, unless you have both in a candidate, you run the risk of misalignment and your hire going astray.

To ensure you’re getting an engineering candidate that fits your culture, it’s critical to properly define your engineering team’s culture before looking to fill your empty seat.

How Do You Define Your Engineering Team’s True Culture?

Defining your engineering team’s true culture will require more than just looking at your publicly stated values—it’s about looking at observed behaviors, decisions made at every level, and your team’s daily practices. These things are what make up your team’s character when it comes to solving problems, working together, and even handling failure.

So how do you determine if your culture is properly set to find the right engineering candidates?

Here are some of the indicators you’ll want to ask yourself about your team culture:

• Psychological Safety: Does your team feel safe to take risks, voice opinions, and admit mistakes?
• Blamelessness: When something goes wrong, does your team focus on fixing the problem instead of finding someone to blame?
• Ownership and Autonomy: Do your engineers have agency over their ideas? Are they being micromanaged or are they allowed to work on their own to find creative solutions?
• Emphasis on Technical Excellence: Does your team make decisions that favor high-quality code, avoiding technical debt, and following proper engineering standards? Are decisions made based on doing a job well done instead of group politics?
• Customer-Centricity: Does your team care about the impact their work has on the customer or the user? Or do they care about just finishing their code and shipping it out?

Reflect on the answers you came with to these questions. Did any of the answers prompt the thought “Can this be done better?”

You should always be encouraging and reinforcing a culture that aims to create a safe, productive, open-minded, and integrity-driven work environment so that your next engineer hire will be aligned with your organization.

But whenever you’re ready to search for your next engineering candidate, it’s important to assess a candidate without bias to ensure that they truly match with your team, and to make that possible, you must have a well-defined team culture.

What Techniques Should You Use to Vet Cultural Fit Without Bias?

In order to vet cultural fit without bias—whether you’re hiring internally or through an IT engineering staffing partner—you’ll want to first define your culture as explained above.

Next, create structured questions and rubrics for your interviews to objectively rate and compare candidates for cultural fit.  

Finally, analyze each candidate and not just how they fit into your existing culture but also if they can add to it in a helpful way.

We’ve already gone over how to define your culture. But for your structured interviews, you’ll want to make sure you take these steps:

• Keep your interviews structured with the same questions to maintain fair comparisons of each candidate.
• Use behavioral and situational questions to dig deeper and determine if a candidate’s values match up with yours.
• Assemble a diverse group of interviewers to approach a candidate from different angles and gain different perspectives.
• Assess the candidate’s practical skills by analyzing their work samples and/or giving them work exercises.
• Throughout the whole interview, observe the candidate and see if they are an active listener and how open they are to discussion.
• After the interview, assess the candidate by their scorecard to help avoid bias that may come from vague feelings.

Having a score rubric serves as a foundation for objective assessment when you’re doing the after-interview assessment. If you need further objective assessment, you could even add in a psychometric test to gain insight into a candidate’s personality, cognitive ability, and their behavioral fit.

Don’t Just Hire Your Next Engineer Fast—
Hire the Right Cultural Fit

Cultural fit is more than just a soft skill that candidates have—for your team to be high-performing, cultural fit is an essential requirement! Hiring the wrong engineer will create friction amongst the team, erode trust, and harm sprint velocity and project delivery.

But having the right engineer on your team can amplify your team’s strengths, quicken project progress, and positively fortify your team’s culture and the harmony between team members.

With Provato’s structured approach to finding candidates that qualify in both technical skills and cultural alignment, you can focus more on how you’re going to greet your new hire after choosing from a shortlist of fully-screened candidates.

So don’t gamble on your next engineer hire, ensure that they fit your team in every way with Provato Staffing.