As a business owner, your first priority is to see your company flourish and have the best team at the helm of affairs running the day-to-day operations of the company. Having the best team for your business is often easier said than done. The best candidate is not someone who is simply qualified for the job. Instead, a good candidate is someone who understands the company’s culture, knows its personality, and how it operates. This is often termed “the culture fit”.
Increasingly, however more and more companies are facing criticism and lawsuits over alleged discrimination of the workers under the garb of culture fit. The question you are bound to ask the best California business law firm is where does the line of culture fit ends and the boundary of discrimination start?
The Choice on a Knife’s Edge
There are loads of situations when you’ll find yourself have two probable candidates for the job each matching the other from strength to strength. Deciding which one to hire and which one to let go then comes down to intuition or gut feeling. These decisions are based on impulse, when you look at the peripherals about the candidate such as their personality, etc. to make your choice between the two.
People who are in favor of culture fit argue that companies should hire people who create harmony and can easily gel well with the team. They believe that sometimes qualifications are not the only thing that matters, that adaption to a company’s culture holds considerable significance.
Unfortunately, problems can arise when the business resorts to hiring people who are “one of us” and letting other qualified candidates equally capable of getting the job lay by the wayside because of some superficial unimportant reasons. For example, thinking that a man might not be able to mesh in well with the creative gals or that a candidate in their 40s is not fit to be part of a startup.
As your lawyers from the best California business law firm will tell you, there is a thin line between cultural fit becoming a smokescreen for age-old discrimination.
Feedback and Loop of Cultural Fit
Twitter was the subject of a recent lawsuit that was filed by Tina Huang, a female who belonged to Asia. She alleged that the fact that Twitter’s team is made up of a mostly men who are white, the company’s recruitment has become homogenous. She believed that because the management is made up of people who belong to a particular type, they hire and promote the same type of candidates by way of their feedback.
Such ill-informed favoritism and rejection of candidates based on personal preferences are ways of using cultural fit as a garb to hide discrimination. This is also bad for business as law suits can tarnish the reputation of a company and would require you hiring the best California business law firm to get acquitted. Make sure there is diversity in your work place if you are to avoid crossing the line between bad culture fit and discrimination.