Belonging Is a Better Hiring Standard Than “Culture Fit”

Culture fit asks whether someone resembles the room. Belonging asks whether the room is built for more than one kind of person.

For decades, recruitment has relied on the idea of "culture fit" to protect team cohesion.

It sounds reasonable. Nobody wants to hire someone who makes work harder or less collaborative. So hiring managers look for people who feel familiar. Someone who gets the same references. Communicates in the same way. Feels like they'd settle into the team quickly.

I’ve heard it referenced by a leader before as asking, ”would you enjoy being stuck at the airport with this person for six hours?” Of course you’d want to have rapport with someone you work with; but this doesn't tell you who'll challenge your thinking, improve the way your team works, or feel safe enough to speak when something goes wrong.

Culture fit rarely measures shared values. More often, it measures familiarity and comfort. Research by sociologist Lauren Rivera found that employers in elite professional service firms often assessed candidates through shared leisure interests, experiences and self-presentation styles. In other words, hiring wasn't only about skills, it was also about cultural similarity.

Belonging is more demanding than the idea of culture fit. It isn't asking whether someone can adapt to the existing culture. It's asking whether the organisation is creating the conditions for different people to do their best work.

When familiarity becomes the standard, recruitment starts reproducing the same backgrounds, networks and communication styles. This isn’t the outcome that drives innovation and useful change.

What belonging actually means

Belonging at work is the experience of having a legitimate place in an organisation. And, ideally, both seeing and feeling it.

It means your contribution is recognised, your presence makes a difference and you can do your job without performing a more acceptable version of yourself.

Belonging isn't the same as being popular, though. It doesn't require everyone to become friends, agree on everything or treat work like a family. It's also not a vague feeling. It can be backed up with concrete examples.

On the Eat Sleep Work Repeat, Bruce Daisley has explored the concept of "we-ness": the idea that a genuine sense of collective identity is the hidden precondition for psychological safety. Quoting social psychologist John Turner, Daisley argues that it is social identity — the feeling of being part of a group with real meaning — that allows people to take risks, surface concerns, and do their best work. It’s built through the accumulated quality of everyday interactions and experiences:

• Being seen and valued for what you contribute;
• Understanding how your work connects to something meaningful;
• Feeling part of a team without having to erase what makes you different;
• Having enough trust to ask questions, disagree and admit mistakes;
• Knowing that your presence matters beyond the tasks listed in your job description.

A person can be included in a meeting and still feel irrelevant. They can be well-liked by their team and still feel disconnected from the organisation. They can be successful in their role and still spend every day editing themselves to fit in. It feels like we-ness is a clearer, more useful, way of saying belonging.

Why belonging is better than culture fit or culture add

Increasingly, well intentioned leaders, instead, use the term “culture add” to fight against the idea of having people assimilate to an existing culture.

Culture add is a step in the right direction. It recognises that a team shouldn't simply reproduce itself. But it can still treat difference as something a candidate must justify.

“What exactly do you add to our culture?” It sounds welcoming, but it can carry an uncomfortable subtext: convince us that there's a reason to make room for you.

Belonging flips the question onto the employer. It doesn't ask candidates to demonstrate that they're different in an interesting or commercially useful way. It asks whether the organisation is ready to value people with different experiences, working styles and ways of seeing the world.

Culture fit and culture add both begin with the organisation as the reference point, but they pull you into asking questions about the candidates alone, rather than of the organisation.

That distinction matters because the candidate isn't the only one being assessed.

Recruitment is also an invitation. Every interview, email, delay, question and interaction tells candidates what kind of organisation they might be joining. The process is already answering a question, whether you intend it to or not: “Would someone like me be able to do good work here?”

Belonging isn't about making everyone comfortable

Belonging isn’t about creating a workplace where everyone feels comfortable all the time, though. If nobody's ever challenged, disappointed or asked to reconsider their assumptions, you’d have harmony rather than progress.

Belonging means people can experience challenge without having their legitimacy questioned.

It's the difference between:

• "Your idea isn't right for this project" and "People like you don't understand how we work."
• "We need to change the deadline" and "You should have known this already."
• "We disagree, so let's examine the evidence" and "You're making things difficult."

What belonging looks like day to day

Belonging isn't created by one workshop, one employee resource group or one carefully worded message from the CEO. It's built in the small moments people experience daily:

• It looks like a manager explaining why a decision was made, rather than treating information as a privilege for the inner circle.
• It looks like meetings where the same two confident voices don't automatically set the direction, and where disagreement is treated as contribution rather than disloyalty.
• It looks like recognition that's specific. Not just "great job", but "your decision to challenge that assumption helped us avoid a costly mistake."
• It looks like flexibility that's trusted rather than granted as a reward for proving commitment.
• It looks like being able to say, "I don't understand", "I need more time" or "I think we're solving the wrong problem" without turning those statements into evidence that you're not a team player.
• It also looks like being able to do good work without becoming socially available at all times. Belonging shouldn't require people to attend every after-work drink, share every personal detail or turn their colleagues into their closest friends.

The business case is clear, too. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that employees with a high sense of belonging showed a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% reduction in turnover risk and 75% fewer sick days.

More recent research from KPMG found that half of employees would accept a salary 10% below market to work somewhere they genuinely feel at home, rather than take a higher-paying role without that sense of connection.

That isn't an argument for replacing fair pay with office socialising, but it's a reminder that people don't experience work as just a transaction. Relationships and connections shape whether a job feels worth pushing through when things get difficult.

What belonging looks like in recruitment

Recruitment is often the first place where belonging is either made credible or is quietly undermined. Here are some ways that talent teams can showcase or demonstrate belonging, to help the right candidates decide if they’re the right person for a role:

1. Describe the real working environment

A list of benefits isn't the same as having a culture.

Candidates want to know how decisions are made, how teams communicate, what managers expect and what a normal week actually looks like. They need the useful details to help them self-select in or out

Is the role genuinely flexible? Are meetings mostly collaborative or mostly independent? Does the team value debate, speed, precision or autonomy? What happens when priorities change?

The more accurately you describe the work, the more fairly candidates can decide whether it’s right for them.

2. Make the process legible

Unclear processes create uncertainty, and uncertainty is rarely experienced equally.

Tell candidates what to expect, who they'll meet, how decisions will be made and when they can expect to hear back. Explain what each stage is designed to assess.

A transparent recruitment process doesn't remove all anxiety, but it can reduce it.

3. Separate evidence from affinity

Structured interviews help hiring teams assess the things that matter for the role. They also reduce the temptation to turn rapport into evidence.

The candidate who makes the panel laugh isn't necessarily the candidate who'll perform best. Assess skills, judgement, behaviours and experience against clear criteria.

The person who speaks in the same style as the hiring manager isn't necessarily the person who'll collaborate most effectively.

4. Ask questions that reveal working conditions

Instead of asking whether someone's a culture fit, ask questions that help both sides understand how they work best.

For example:

• Where have you done your best work, and what made that possible?
• Tell us about a meaningful disagreement you handled well. What happened next?
• What helps you contribute when you're new to a team?
• What kind of management brings out your best work?
• When have you changed your mind because of someone else's perspective?

These questions reveal something about the candidate, as well as the organisation.

5. Let candidates assess you

Belonging can't be promised by one side only.

Give candidates enough information to understand the team they may join. Let them ask future colleagues what's difficult about the role, how disagreement works and what support looks like in practice.

The aim isn't to persuade every candidate to accept the offer. It's to make the decision more honest for everyone.

6. Make the first weeks match the promise

The first few weeks tell people whether the organisation meant what it said in the recruitment process.

As Ginny Clarke, conscious leadership expert and former executive recruiter at Google, wrote in FUTURE(S) by Welcome to the Jungle: "Candidates need to know that employers and teams will support them. I'm bringing my skills, my capabilities, my expertise, my personality, and my tendencies. To the extent that I have demonstrated that I am effective in performing in this role, then that should be enough."

If the team says that questions are welcome, new hires shouldn't be left to decode everything alone. If the company talks about flexibility, managers shouldn't quietly reward visibility. If the team says that different perspectives matter, those perspectives need to influence decisions.

How Welcome to the Jungle helps teams show belonging

Belonging is difficult to communicate through words alone. It becomes more credible when candidates can see how work actually happens, and why.

Welcome to the Jungle helps teams make that reality more visible: the people, the work, the ways of collaborating and the details that rarely fit into a standard job advert. That visibility gives candidates enough information to imagine themselves in the role and decide whether the environment could work for them.

The goal isn't to convince everyone that your company is the right place. It's to help the right people recognise it, before either side spends time trying to force a fit. Employers like Wise and hyperexponential have shared that by providing transparency and by showing up authentically during the recruitment process, it can create friction and put some candidates off. But this saves candidates, and their teams, time and effort in the end.

The better question

The real test of a hire isn't whether you'd enjoy being stuck with them at the airport.

It's whether, when an important project starts to go wrong on a Tuesday afternoon, that person feels safe enough to speak up. And whether your team has created the conditions for them to do so.

Culture fit predicts comfort. Culture add looks for difference. Belonging creates the conditions for people to contribute, challenge and stay.

That's a better standard for recruitment. It's also a more honest, human, one.

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