Hard Skills > Culture Fit

So here's a little bit of hiring people logic for you. I've expressed it as pseudo-code all those technical people who insist on exclusive hard skill hiring, despite the long term pain of it all.

private Handler handler;
public Employee effectiveEmployee;
public int numberofEffectiveEmployees = n; 
if (hard skills > culture fit) {
            handler = new Handler;
            numberofEffectiveEmployees -= 0.5;
        } else {
            effectiveEmployee = new Employee;


My code probably doesn't explain itself (and probably won't compile), so here goes.

So, a handler is the person (who may well have done the hiring if there is any justice) who tidies up the mess of a hire that doesn't fit with the culture that exists at your organisation. Not the public facing culture either, the actual one. Effectively for every poor cultural fit hired, you reduce the effectiveness of your remaining employees by a bit. Probably a fair bit. I went for half. Arbitrary. I harangue technical hires for this mainly as a sweeping generalisation, but it happens all over really.


You can tell you're a handler when:

-The same person is in front of you all the time.
-You exhaust a repertoire of approaches to people management and problem solving that have served you quite well in a successful career thank you.
-Other people talk to you about that person all the time or the conversation always go that way.
-The organisation can't figure out what it wants from person.


You can tell you're a handlee when:

-You are always in front of your manager.
-Your manager appears irrational and changes approaches at seemingly random intervals.
-You appear to be the subject of conversation regularly in contexts that are probably nothing to do with you.
-The organisation can't figure out what to do with you.


This is not a blame thing. Both handler and handlee are doing what comes naturally to them. Both are perfectly effective but just not right now. The problem is the culture black hole which exists between them, very, very slow drawing them both in. Or very fast. I forget which way time dilation and black holes work.


A black hole is good analogy. As soon as you are committed to hire and the initial honeymoon period is done, the culture shock kicks in. And there are few ways to escape once the gravity well kicks in. None of them particularly pleasant.

Next time you think 'hey this person is a Perl wizard' also ask; 'will this person systematically alienate the rest of the humans around them?' You'll thank me for it.


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