Matching Candidates to Culture: How Assessments of Organisational Fit Shape the Hiring Process

Abstract

Organisational fit represents a crucial criterion in the hiring process. This article aims to understand how employers and external recruitment consultants define and apply organisational fit in professional labour markets, such as engineering, marketing and finance. It also investigates how the use of organisational fit in hiring can lead to social bias within these labour markets. It relies on semi-structured interviews with 47 external recruitment consultants who assist employers in these sectors. The article draws on Relational Inequality Theory to demonstrate how hiring managers and consultants use organisational fit to create and justify boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable candidates. Claim-making supports the rationalisation and legitimisation in the exclusion of groups of candidates. The article critically informs human resource management, business and psychology literature that perceive organisational fit as a largely benign criterion for recruitment. It also extends sociological and critical management literature by delineating three main exclusionary mechanisms in matching candidates for organisational fit.