DS Cohen & Associates
Part Three closed with a precise observation. If the foundation of a lasting culture is values lived in daily practice, then two things decide whether that foundation holds or quietly erodes. The first is what people experience at work. The second is who the organization chooses to bring into that system. Both come down to a single question: who do you hire, and what are you looking for when you hire them?
Every Hire Is a Cultural Decision
In a complex adaptive system, culture emerges from the accumulated daily interactions of the people in it. Each person influences, however, subtly, what is normal here, what is tolerated, what is admired, and what it costs to act with integrity. That influence compounds quietly over time.
This makes every hiring decision a cultural decision.
When you bring in a new person, you are introducing an agent into the system. That person will either reinforce the existing cultural pattern, the attractor states the organization has built and sustained, or they will perturb it. A single incongruent hire rarely changes anything. But five or twenty or fifty hires who do not demonstrate the values of the culture will gradually shift the attractor. The pattern weakens. The culture the organization took a generation to build begins to drift, usually without anyone designing the drift and often without anyone recognizing it until the evidence is undeniable.
Most organizations treat hiring as a staffing function. The question they are solving is whether a candidate has the skills to do the job. That is necessary. It is not sufficient.
The Camera and the Film
Think of a psychometric assessment as a camera. It takes a photograph. The photograph captures the stable traits a person carries, the dispositions that persist over time. Frameworks like the Big Five give you a portrait of tendency, a reliable picture of who someone is generally inclined to be. That information is useful. It is also incomplete.
A photograph tells you what the person looks like. It does not tell you what they do.
Film is different. Film footage is sequential, situational, and real. It captures a person in motion, making choices under genuine pressure. The recent film is more accurate than old footage. The footage that matters is recent. The footage that predicts is specific.
The question is the camera. The answer is the picture. And in the picture, what you are looking for is not the frame, which is the situation the person describes, but the actions they took within it.
Most interviewers spend too much time on the frame. The frame does not tell you who the person is. The actions in the picture tell you who the person is. What did they do when the easier choice was available? What did they say when silence would have been safer? What did they decide when no one was watching?
That is the film. That is the evidence of behaviour. And recent behaviour, frequently demonstrated, is the most reliable predictor of what the person will do when the same conditions arise again.
Can Do and Will Do
Every selection process answers whether a candidate can do the job. Credentials, psychometric profiles, and skills assessments speak to capacity and tendency. They establish potential.
Culture is not sustained by potential. It is sustained by what people do, day after day, in the moments that matter and, in the moments, no one is watching. The question most hiring processes fail to ask is whether the candidate will do the job in the way the culture requires. You cannot answer that with a traits assessment. You can only answer it with evidence of past behaviour, properly elicited, in situations that genuinely tested the person.
What Follows When You Get It Right
When an organization consistently brings in people who have demonstrated the behaviours that reflect its values, the results are predictable. Retention improves because people who fit behaviourally find the environment coherent and reinforcing. Productivity improves because people are not spending energy navigating the gap between stated and actual values. Innovation becomes possible because psychological safety, built one interaction at a time by people who behave consistently with the values, creates the conditions for creative risk. Belonging emerges naturally from working alongside people who operate the same way you do.
These are not passive or accidental outcomes. They are properties of an agent population that is behaviourally congruent with the culture. They do not have to be managed into existence because arise when the system is composed correctly.
Your Roadmap: Selecting the Best
Understanding why you must hire for behavioural fit is the first step. Knowing how to do it is the second.
Selecting the Best provides the complete roadmap. It begins with the work most organizations skip, identifying the authentic behaviours your organization lives, not the values stated on a wall, but the behaviours your top performers genuinely demonstrate under real conditions. From there, it guides you through the design of structured behavioural questions that produce the film footage you need, recent, specific, and grounded in actual choices made under actual pressure.
Selecting the Best is available now from major online booksellers.
David S. Cohen is the author of “Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workplace Driven by Values for Lasting Success,” amplifies each of the points of this article using a combination of research and anecdotal stories. The appendix contains sample behavioural interview questions. Selecting the Best is available on Amazon and other online book sellers.
