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Not a Cultural Fit

Andrei Rusu on August 02, 2018

About five years ago I was interviewing in Amsterdam for a software engineering position at one of the largest telecom companies in Norway. It was ...
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Andrei Rusu • Edited

I should add that since that ridiculous interview I have worked in 4 different places in Norway, over about 5 years (3 of which as a consultant). In my experience, “culture fit” is not a very common thing here in Oslo but on the other hand many companies are using personality tests to screen their candidates and usually they inspect academic records.

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Jen Chan

Thanks for the honest post. I find the term "culture fit" to be coded language, a euphemism that could just about mean anything. It could just be that I had wrong face, or said "um" too much.

Shopify calls it "values alignment". For minorities and LGBTQ it's a question of passing "as normative". I have many a time doubted that my lively, humorous, and sometimes snarky (never about workplace) twitter account has put me off people.

Recruitment should be judging by irl attitude, references and experience on the job, but rarely is it about that. :p

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Antonio Radovcic

Your article is missing some paragraphs at the end. 😬

I think cultural fit just means whether the interviewers liked you or not. I would be surprised if they actually tried to evaluate it by some defined criteria. It’s just that they can‘t write that into the feedback-form and instead go with something more vague like culture.

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Andrei Rusu

Thanks, I have added the missing ending - it was cut off during the import.