[mlashcorp]

You are correct, "culture fit" is not a good descriptor of what I meant.

We hire people we believe we will be able to work with. It's not a popularity contest, we evaluate problem solving, analytical thinking and communication skills, such as the ability to explain complex topics in easy terms.

I'll give you an example, usually we are interviewing people straight out of the university, but this can be applied to any candidate.

I'll start by asking the candidate to talk about his master's project. As he talks about it, I'll guide the conversation towards these topics : -What was the problem -How was it defined? -How did you tackle it? -Explain your solution -support your decisions -Was there a cost/benefit analysis? -How was the problem decomposed?

This will give me an initial picture of the candidate's ability to address a problem, and is far more important to me than wether he knows "the number after F in hexadecimal" or some other nonsense.

[Peroni]

This isn't screening for 'culture fit' though and I'd sincerely recommend avoiding referring to it as that. You're screening for strong communication skills and that's absolutely fine (and highly recommended).

Interviewing for culture fit (as you've seen in the responses to your comment) has an extremely negative stigma attached to it for good reason.

[philipps]

I strongly agree with this. “Culture fit” is one of those concepts that often disadvantages “others”. This is something we may not be able to avoid without putting in place safeguards (concert musicians were predominantly male until blind auditions were used - and it turned out that female musicians play just as well or better).

As I mention above this is often not a result of bad intentions, but of implicit biases that have an effect on our judgements even if we are fully aware of them and explicitly try to avoid them.

See https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/aboutus.html

[lucozade]

On reading this post, it may well be that culture fit is quite a good description.

At least from the POV that you're selecting from a small cadre of (almost exclusively) male masters grads.