Don’t Assess Cultural Fit with Personal Questions
In a recent workshop, one of the participants explained, “I like to ask personal questions to see if the candidate will fit in with the team socially.”
Well, that’s an illegal discrimination. * in the US, but not in other places. (It’s illegal because if you reject a candidate based on their answer, you’re discriminating about something not work-related, a big no-no in the US.) Even for non-US interviewers, I still think it’s a bad idea.
People enjoy different activities at different times in their lives. Before I had children, I took bicycling vacations, camping and cycling for a week or two. But by the time I had children, there was no way I was going to spend precious vacation time doing something active when I could sleep in 
Even without the obvious difference of kids/no kids, people choose to spend their time and money differently–a difference that doesn’t make a bit of difference for the job.
Assessing cultural fit is important, and the questions you want to ask might be some of these:
- “Tell me about your greatest successes. What caused your success?”
- “Tell me about your greatest challenges. What caused them?”
- “How has the work environment helped you or prevented you from being successful?”
Now you’ve got a conversation about work, and how people fit in (or not) at work–a much more relevant set of questions than what people do in their off time.
* Thank you to askamanager for your comment. You are correct; unless you hit on a protected class, the questions aren’t actually illegal. Ill-considered, not helpful, but not illegal.
1 comment February 6th, 2008