It’s essentially a law of human behavior: We feel most comfortable with people who are similar to us. But that similarity can lead to all kinds of dilemmas in the workplace, especially when it comes to hiring. Award-winning sociologist Lauren Rivera is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her research explores how people define and evaluate status and merit, and how those definitions shape social inequalities. Her best-selling book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs investigates on-campus recruitment and hiring for elite professional service firms. On the season 6 premiere, organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava sit down with Lauren to discuss how the paths to elite opportunities start at an early age and can be heavily dependent on one’s socioeconomic status. They also unpack why the term “culture fit” can actually mean social similarity in a way that often advantages white, high-class men and can reinforce gender, race, class, and disability inequalities. *The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
It’s essentially a law of human behavior: We feel most comfortable with people who are similar to us. But that similarity can lead to all kinds of dilemmas in the workplace, especially when it comes to hiring.
Award-winning sociologist Lauren Rivera is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her research explores how people define and evaluate status and merit, and how those definitions shape social inequalities. Her best-selling book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs investigates on-campus recruitment and hiring for elite professional service firms.
On the season 6 premiere, organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava sit down with Lauren to discuss how the paths to elite opportunities start at an early age and can be heavily dependent on one’s socioeconomic status. They also unpack why the term “culture fit” can actually mean social similarity in a way that often advantages white, high-class men and can reinforce gender, race, class, and disability inequalities.
*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
Full transcript available at: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/posts/when-culture-fit-becomes-a-recipe-for-bias/
[00:00:00] Jennifer Chatman: Hey, Sameer. It's great to be back with the podcast, and so hard to believe we're starting our sixth season.
[00:00:07] Sameer Srivastava: I know what you mean. We've had some terrific guests over the last few years, and I always feel like I'm learning something new in these conversations.
[00:00:15] Jennifer Chatman: Me, too.
[00:00:16] Sameer Srivastava: All right. So, to start off this season, Jenny, let's begin with an interesting and fun question. So, we know that dating apps love to match people who are supposedly compatible with each other. They have similar interests, the same vibe. Do you think that actually makes for better matches or just more comfortable ones?
[00:00:35] Jennifer Chatman: Well, I'm no expert on dating, having been married for more years than I can share at this point, but what I will say is that psychologists view the similarity attraction bias as almost a law of human behavior. We are attracted to and feel comfortable with people who are similar to us. But therein lies the bias part of it, and our guest today is really going to unpack this and help us understand what we miss by falling prey to the similarity attraction bias.
[00:01:08] Sameer Srivastava: Yeah, because it turns out that same trade-off of what's comfortable versus what leads to a good match is actually at the heart of the dilemma that firms face when they're deciding whom to hire as well. So, let's get into it.
[00:01:20] Jennifer Chatman: I'm Jenny Chatman, a professor and dean at the Haas School, and this is The Culture Kit.
[00:01:27] Sameer Srivastava: And I'm Sameer Srivastava, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.
[00:01:35] Jennifer Chatman: Today, we're joined by Lauren Rivera, an award-winning sociologist. Lauren is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Her research unpacks how people define and evaluate status and merit, and how those definitions shape social inequalities.
She's also looked deeply at what it means to hire for culture fit, a topic we've talked a lot about on this podcast, and how cultural similarities can provide access to desirable jobs and occupations. Her best-selling book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, at Princeton University Press, investigates on-campus recruitment and hiring for elite professional service firms.
Lauren is currently working on a variety of projects examining interventions to reduce workplace inequalities.
Lauren, welcome to The Culture Kit.
[00:02:34] Lauren Rivera: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.
[00:02:38] Sameer Srivastava: So, Lauren, you and I have known each other since grad school days, and as you know, I've been a big fan of your work from the very beginning. I find it really thought-provoking the way you think about merit and how it can become secondary to less-controllable factors when one is evaluating talent in the workplace.
So, maybe just as background, could you tell us what prompted you to focus on defining and thinking about the role of merit across education and work environments?
[00:03:04] Lauren Rivera: Yeah. It stems a little bit from my background. So, I grew up in an untraditional background for many academics. I grew up in a low-income family raised by a single mom who had immigrated to the U.S., and when I was in junior high school, my mom got a job at one of the most elite private schools in LA.
So, these are the types of places where now paparazzi line the gates, and it was a very, very different environment from the background I had grown up in, and it was like entering an entirely new world of cultural rules I didn't quite understand. And this sparked a long-standing interest of mine in understanding how it is that people size other people up in terms of who has status, who doesn't, who we actually give credibility to, who we don't, what are the various ways that people communicate and understand worth in social settings.
And throughout my career, I've studied it in different capacities. I started off with going back to the high school setting, and in undergraduate, I worked on projects looking at what factors shaped people's entrance into popular groups. I ended up studying things like, you know, how do bouncers at very elite nightclubs decide who to handpick out of lines?
And while these settings were really fascinating from an intellectual perspective, I was really interested in a status sort that's more consequential than who ends up in the popular clique or the VIP. And workplaces are one of the most consequential status sorts we end up going through. And in particular, hiring decisions shape not only if you get a job or not, but they shape our ability to enter a particular economic status, a particular social status, and so forth.
[00:04:36] Sameer Srivastava: Thanks for sharing that context, Lauren. That's super helpful. So, we always like to start with definitions, and in your work, a lot of your work really centers on this concept of merit. So, how do you define what merit actually means?
[00:04:50] Lauren Rivera: Yes. So, it's actually a complicated answer, but to keep it short, merit stems from the Latin word "meteo," meaning to earn. And the idea of distributing positions of honor or importance or power on the basis of someone earning them rather than inheriting them harkens back thousands of years, right?
But there are different ways and different times we've conceptualized what merit is. What does it mean to earn something? What does it mean to deserve something? But the idea of merit fundamentally is we are looking to distribute opportunities based off of who has the right stuff. Now, as Jenny mentioned in the introduction, that's going to open things to a lot of subjectivity, right?
Because we know that we want to do it not off inheritance, based off of individual qualities, off of showing you have the right stuff, but oftentimes that right stuff is very open to interpretation, and what counts as merit is often historically specific, and it's varied from time to time, place to place, and crucially for our topic today, who's actually judging a particular individual in an interview room and beyond.
[00:05:58] Jennifer Chatman: Well, it's so interesting, Lauren, because I think most of us pride ourselves on striving to be our best and feeling as though if we get good grades, if we go to a good school, right, if we are a high-integrity leader, all the things that highlight our skills, that that's going to lead to opportunities and promotions based on merit, based on the work that we do.
Your work challenges that assumption in a pretty fundamental way, with your research showing that the path to opportunities and promotions can often be based more on cultural fit, which we're guided to from a really early age. So, does this mean that the path to those elite opportunities starts much earlier than the job interview?
[00:06:43] Lauren Rivera: Yes, 100%. Whether or not you are on the pathway to get an elite job begins way before you enter the interview room. So, some economists like Raj Chetty would actually argue that it begins at birth in terms of the very zip code that you're born into, because different zip codes are associated with different socioeconomic life chances.
But we know from decades of research in sociology and beyond that the social class that you're born into matters so much for where you end up. If you are born to well-educated or affluent parents who have the economic and the cultural capital to do things like pick schools, pick extracurricular activities that actually set children up for success, those children are on the path from the get-go, whereas other children will have other pathways potentially.
So, to give you an example of how the path to getting an elite job begins so much earlier than when you're in the interview room, and it has to do with your parents. After I wrote my book, Pedigree, I received a lot of emails from parents who were desperate to help improve their children's chances of getting a job in an elite firm, right? And the most memorable message was from a parent who was still pregnant with her child. And she really wanted me to help her make sure that their child's life was structured to get them a job at Goldman. Now, I do want to emphasize that doesn't mean that birth is destiny, right? So, I have a chapter in my book about how students from non-traditional backgrounds end up breaking into elite worlds, and I would say I'm a case of that, right? I grew up in a low-income family. I worked for an elite consulting firm.
It is really important that we, as a society, acknowledge that there are inequalities in starting points that shape the pathways people end up in.
[00:08:25] Sameer Srivastava: I've heard a lot about tiger parents, but the one you just described who was asking for advice about her unborn baby probably takes the prize.
[00:08:34] Jennifer Chatman: I have to ask, given that you and I both study cultural fit, and, you know, I have more of a descriptive definition of culture fit, that it just is a title for something that can vary from low to high. So, I would love to hear —you have a contrasting definition, and how you think about that.
[00:08:55] Lauren Rivera: Yes, I'm so glad you asked that, Jenny, because I think you and I are talking about slightly different things. The world in which your version of cultural fit, where we are selecting new hires on the basis of values that are related to the job at hand, would be a world I would want to live in, right? If we are going to do this systematically.
But what I found in my study of hiring in elite law firms, consulting firms, and investment banks, is that people use that same terminology of cultural fit, but it was really a catch-all term for social similarity. People were looking for candidates who were similar in backgrounds, lifestyles, hobbies. You know, were you a varsity athlete? So was I.
Exactly what you said at the beginning of the similarity attraction bias, that's what they meant, right? And we know from your amazing research that when we measure cultural fit in the other way, in terms of what we should be measuring it, in terms of work-related values, styles, et cetera, that it makes organizations better.
But when we talk about it in the way that my interviewees and subjects talked about, it's a recipe for bias and discrimination.
[00:10:02] Jennifer Chatman: Yeah, so it's almost a coded term in your work.
[00:10:06] Sameer Srivastava: So, I wanted to push a little bit more on this notion of cultural fit. As you know, in some of my own work on this topic, and I know Jenny has work that's also related to this, we found that what seems to matter more for doing well in an organization is enculturability, or the rate at which people learn and adapt to the culture rather than their initial level of fit.
What are your thoughts on that question of the speed of learning versus initial levels of alignment?
[00:10:33] Jennifer Chatman: Well, and if I could just add to Sameer's question. In my dissertation work, I did a horse race test of whether cultural fit at the organizational level was more derived from who you hired versus how you socialized people.
And the horse race test showed that selection, if you will, accounted for about 15% of fit, but socialization accounted for about 40% of fit, so that there's something about what you do with people once they join that really aligns them with the organization's priorities.
[00:11:08] Lauren Rivera: Yeah, and I think that that really gets at a point that is key here, in that hiring is really, really important, but too often managers conceptualize merit in this very, very static way. It's almost, I teach my MBAs that, it's like we think of it as a suitcase that someone carries around with them from place to place.
And we know from social psychology and from management, that's not at all how job performance works. It's an interaction between the individual and the environment, and one of the things of the environment that really matters is how well do we actually socialize people into our workplace norms and values? How well do we mentor them, support them? So, this idea that, I hear it all the time with my students, and I love my students, right? But people are motivated or unmotivated, right? Or people are go-getters or not, and I always try to problematize that. It's a match between the individual and the environment.
And so, I do think that is very consistent with this idea that when we talk about culture fit in the way that it should be implemented and discussed, which is, are you actually in line with the values and orientations of how we do work here or our mission or our purpose, right? That is something that, of course, we can select on, but we also build it day by day.
One of the things it also reminds me of is other research on diversity more broadly, in that managers overestimate the time it takes to actually socialize new members from different places into a group. We often hear that we can't hire people who are different from us because there'd be so much conflict, or it'll take forever to get us on the same page.
And we actually know that that shared environment of being in a team or an organization together creates a new context where we actually break down those barriers if we're in a supportive environment pretty quickly, right? So, I do think that your work really points to this idea that merit can take many forms, and part of it, of course, is selecting the right entrants, but we should do so on things related to the job, not whether or not you play lacrosse or you're a crew rower, things like this.
But also, it really does matter what we do with individuals to bring them into and develop them within our organizations.
[00:13:23] Sameer Srivastava: So, you mentioned diversity. I want to dig a little bit deeper into that because a lot of your work has also looked at how cultural fit intersects with race, gender, and more recently, disabilities in either opening up or closing off access to opportunities, particularly in elite institutions. Can you say a little bit more about what you've been finding in that line of work?
[00:13:43] Lauren Rivera: Yes, definitely. And so, when it comes to culture fit, this can be a code word that we use to put all the feelings of comfort with similarity or discomfort or anxiety about difference that we have and use it in a way that sounds legitimate. But when people select on that perceived similarity in terms of not are we similar in what we care about at work, but are we similar in terms of where we come from and what we like to do in our spare time, it reinforces societal inequalities elsewhere.
So, in my work, I've found both in the qualitative research I've done and then in an audit study with my co-author András Tilcsik at the University of Toronto, where we sent fictitious resumes to large law firms where everything was identical on the resume except the perceived social class of the candidate as well as their perceived gender, and I'm happy to talk about how we signaled that.
But we found that this process of cultural fit in elite organizations actually works most in favor of white men from high-class backgrounds, right? So, there's a gendered component, there's a racialized component, and there also is a disability component. I've been studying disability more in the school system, but there is some really interesting research coming out of France looking at how autistic workers are perceived in job interviews.
And one of the most striking studies, it was a lab-based study where they had, you know, job candidates go through and various evaluators rating them. And what they found is when evaluators watched videos of job candidates who are autistic going through their job interviews, and they had access to the video, they rated them significantly lower on quality. However, when they just looked at the transcript, they rated them significantly higher, right?
And so, it is really important to know that our level of comfort with someone derives not only from their actual merit or deservingness or qualifications as a job candidate, but rather how similar do we feel to them, and in addition, is this person a member of a historically dominant or high-status group?
[00:15:46] Jennifer Chatman: Well, I was really interested and discouraged to find that your disability research found that discrimination was happening at the level of access even to high-quality public education, not just to jobs. And so, what does that tell us about how these patterns start so early even in contexts that are explicitly governed by anti-discrimination law?
[00:16:09] Lauren Rivera: Yeah. I think that disability is a very interesting case in that things are very much regulated in education. But it happens at the earliest moments of education. I just published a paper with a postdoc, Estela Díaz, where we found disability discrimination in how elite private schools judge toddlers in terms of who's admitted to elite preschool programs.
I mean, they're evaluating two-, three-year-olds. Not all of them have disabilities. It's they were trying to exclude any child they thought might one day develop any type of disability, including ADHD, on the autism spectrum, et cetera. And so, that work is some of the most challenging work that I do. I have two kiddos who are identified with different disabilities, with different support needs.
But I really do think it is a very clear example of how the way that we judge who has worth or value in society is driven by a lot of stuff that is more than just, is that person capable? Is that person qualified? Is that person motivated? It has to do with our images, whether it's due to stereotypes, whether it's due to similarity of what we think people in a particular role should be like, as well as what we've seen before.
[00:17:25] Jennifer Chatman: So, your overall conclusions are probably pretty uncomfortable for leaders, and it's not that the people in your studies were bad actors, and they likely weren't intentionally trying to discriminate. In fact, many of them seemed to genuinely believe they were identifying the best candidates.
So, given the visibility of your work, are organizations becoming more aware of these tendencies? Are they starting to make changes? Are there examples that you can share in corporate or academic communities where you've seen effective change based on increased awareness?
[00:18:00] Lauren Rivera: Yes. First of all, I do want to acknowledge it is uncomfortable, and like you said, it's not necessarily driven by people who are malicious. We are humans, and even though I study these processes, when I'm interviewing job applicants for faculty positions, I have to interrupt myself sometimes to say, "Okay, this person is from Southern California, so am I." Like, I have this affinity toward them.
And it really does take active interruption, both on the individual level but also on the organizational level. So, I have seen some change, but change is hard, right? Change management, especially when we're addressing deeply rooted tendencies and biases that have a historical origin, it is challenging.
But especially some of the organizations that I've worked with in the legal profession or in consulting, there has been a desire, and I've seen shifts in two main ways, and I think that they can be informative for managers who are interested in tackling these things head-on. First, I have seen, both in those organizations as well as in others, a desire to move from culture fit to culture add.
And while that might seem like cheap talk, if we start to conceptualize, okay, there are many different ways to be successful here. You can come from a lot of different places in our country or in the world or have different interests and still be at our core in line with our values. I think that's one frame, is just to shift it from culture fit to culture add.
Now, just shifting the language isn't enough because whenever we leave something subjective and unstructured, people are going to find a way to use it in order to reinforce the status quo. So, I think the second is actually structuring the evaluation processes we use in key gate-keeping moments, not only hiring, promotion, evaluation, et cetera.
I was recently talking to a major law firm that has actually completely restructured the way it does promotion to partner to make everything systematic in terms of setting out the criteria you need to do at every level as an associate, as well as this is what we're going to do when it comes to promotion. These are the criteria that count, and these are the criteria that don't count. And if you look at most major law firms, that is not the norm. It's usually this very subjective process where people sit in a room and they say, "Do you have the right stuff to be a partner?" But by formalizing it, they actually have made substantially more progress in promoting women than any of their competitors.
One of the things that's fascinating about the law is that law school graduates are majority women. Women enter law firms at roughly 50% of associates, but they remain about 23% of equity partners nationally. That stat hasn't really changed in 20 years, but this firm has blown it out of the water simply by structuring things.
So, I think, one, is changing things from culture fit to culture add can be important, especially when we think of those individual qualities. Second is you have to structure things. But I think that there also have to be internal champions, because I've done consulting work with organizations in these industries, in law and consulting, where people say, "Come on, we want to fix this. We want to fix this." And they try to fix it, and they don't really want to fix it, right? They just want to be able to do business as usual.
So, I do think it requires a mindset change, but backing up that mindset change with real changes in policies and practices to get us to see that people from a number of different places who have different experiences or different outlooks on the world can actually be who we want to invest in and help succeed.
[00:21:27] Sameer Srivastava: So, let me bring up another uncomfortable reality, which is that some of these biases that we've been talking about are not just in the private sector or with firms out there. They're also in our own backyard in academia. And I know you've done some work on this topic. Can you say a little bit more about the work you did where you embedded yourself in hiring committees, faculty hiring committees, and what did you find?
[00:21:49] Lauren Rivera: Yes, definitely. So, I spent time following around hiring committees in several different disciplines at a major research university. And there were a lot of things that we would expect in terms of these hiring processes, in terms of things that my advisor, Michèle Lamont, has written about, that people favor individuals who use the same research methods or come from a similar topic area.
But what I didn't expect was how salient relationship status was in terms of who ended up getting offers. And relationship status was very, very salient, but only for women who were shortlisted. And so, how this manifested is that university departments were really, really concerned about only giving offers to people who would potentially accept.
And they believed, again, as individual actors, given people's experiences in the world, people didn't necessarily know that they were doing something that was going to potentially lead to bias or, in the state I did the research, is actually illegal. But they thought that a woman who is partnered considers their partner's job or employment status heavily when deciding to weigh a job.
And that led committees to actually exclude some high-performing women who are partnered on account of the fact that they did not believe that the person would actually come to the university if offered.
However, they didn't talk about the partner status of men candidates who were in the pool, and it really was eye-opening in terms of what people did behind the scenes in order to figure out women's marital status. So, I'd be sitting there, and the individuals in my study knew that I was there on behalf of their university to understand how hiring processes worked.
And at one moment that was really poignant in the research, they started Googling people who were on the shortlist and looking at their Facebook profiles to try to understand if there was a partner, right?
And these all come from potentially well-intentioned efforts to identify people who will come to our organization and will be successful. But they strongly bias the hiring process towards men or unpartnered women. And so, it really calls attention, and it did so in a way that violated state law.
So, you know, it is another example of even though we are trying our best in order to identify people who we think are meritorious, what we're identifying is not just the person's qualities, it's reflecting societal biases and similarity differences and biases of the evaluator.
[00:24:21] Sameer Srivastava: Yeah. What I found really fascinating about that work is many of the same people are actually intimately aware of the literature on bias, right? And yet they still can fall prey to it. But so I want to just turn, for a moment, to the role of AI. So, obviously, a lot of firms these days are using AI tools to screen resumes, and of course, job seekers are using AI tools to help them put forward their best application materials.
What's your sense of whether this cat-and-mouse game between job seekers and employers is going to help address this problem or make it worse?
[00:24:56] Lauren Rivera: I think it's almost like Whac-A-Mole, right? That we try to suppress biases potentially by using automated tools, but that then opens up new avenues for bias. So, I think most of your listeners are aware of algorithmic bias. You know, AI tools have a lot of promise in some respects, but we really do have to be careful in the data on which they're trained because they will start to reinforce and reproduce the biases.
One of the most fascinating conversations I have had recently pertaining to AI was actually with one of Sameer's close colleagues, Mahzarin Banaji at Harvard, who pioneered implicit bias. And what we were talking about is that my colleague, Tessa Charlesworth, who was one of Mahzarin's students when LLMs were first becoming popularized and ChatGPT those sorts of things were becoming popularized, she went to Mahzarin, and she said, "You know, we should really start looking at this because this has all sorts of implications for implicit bias," right?
LLMs, especially when they're open source, are going to be trained on data that is available, which is cultural products of society. And so, they took GPT-3 at the time, and Mahzarin typed in, you know, "Do you have implicit bias?" And what do you think GPT-3 said in return?
[00:26:13] Jennifer Chatman: No.
[00:26:14] Lauren Rivera: It said, "I am a white man." Right? Which is absolutely stunning, right? The assumption is... I mean, there's a whole sci-fi movie that can be written about this, right? But when it comes to AI, we know the models are only as good as the data they're trained on, human data...
[00:26:30] Jennifer Chatman: And I would just add they're only as good as the prompts that you can imagine. And if the prompters are captured by cultural bias, the prompts are going to be biased as well. And so, it's not just the data that we're basing it on, but the future and the prompting that we're doing that's creating even the future algorithms.
[00:26:53] Sameer Srivastava: So, my main question is, did the LLM start to then mansplain implicit bias to Mahzarin?
[00:26:56] Jennifer Chatman: Did she ask it for directions?
[00:27:01] Lauren Rivera: One of the things that Mahzarin is working on is this idea that AI doubles down, and AI in many ways displays basic social psychological biases in a way that is enhanced and even more extreme than us. So, I think that, when it comes to AI, we are opening a Whac-A-Mole Pandora's box where we're going to see more of this based off of the prompts, based off of the training data, et cetera.
But what I really also want to mention is a study I'm doing right now on hiring games. So, one of the ways that AI is affecting the hiring process, and to your prior question is how, have you seen change in these organizations?
In some I have, and some we've worked together to create more structured rubrics. But a very common and popular solution in the past several years was to add some sort of online or automated hiring screen in addition to the existing hiring process. So, in elite investment banks, elite consulting firms, these have taken the form of hiring games.
And the idea is you play a video game that is going to collect data about your potential personality traits, where you click, metadata, things like this, and that will be filtered in. And there are a number of tools that different companies use, but one of the commonalities is they're looking for working memory, attention, processing speed. There's even one that's a gamified neuropsychological assessment.
So, it actually goes full circle back to disability, where this is another way in which, okay, we're adding this screen in order to potentially open things up and make it fair, so we consider everyone regardless of what school you went to, but then we're screening out anyone who might be different in any capacity.
And so, I do think this is a place to watch to make sure that the tools that companies are using do continue to keep the funnel open, not only in terms of where we source talent, but we're bringing people who may come from different backgrounds in to be considered.
[00:28:55] Jennifer Chatman: Well, Lauren, I've read many of your papers and followed your work very closely and been a deep admirer, but you've even illuminated things beyond what I know. So, I want to thank you for that. And we like to end the podcast by asking our guests for three practical takeaways for organizational leaders.
What do you want leaders to most take away from today?
[00:29:39] Lauren Rivera: Yes. The first is don't confuse chemistry for qualifications. They are different. Just because you feel good talking to someone does not mean they're actually going to perform well on the job.
The second is to broaden or expand what people consider to be meaningful participation outside of work or school activities.
One of the patterns I find in my work is that when people are defining cultural fit in the individual way, when it's do you come from the same place, same background, oftentimes people are looking for similarities in what people do outside of work. Are you a runner? Are you a rower? Do you like yoga? These sorts of things.
And that opens the door for so many inequalities, and especially when we're talking about younger workers, individuals who have to engage in paid employment to pay their bills or to support their families or have childcare responsibilities. Just because someone isn't running a marathon does not necessarily mean that they're not a motivated or wonderful potential employee.
So, I would say expand what you consider to be meaningful bases of drive or activities outside of work or school that we might use to measure drive.
And then finally, it's just structure your interviews. You know, I think it's a very quick hit that companies can use in terms of making sure that interviews are not just this open-ended, what do you like to do in your spare time, but really tie them to qualities that we want to bring in in new hires and that we will support once people are on the job.
[00:30:48] Sameer Srivastava: Thank you so much, Lauren. That was terrific. Really, really appreciate your time today.
[00:30:51] Lauren Rivera: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
[00:30:55] Jennifer Chatman: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a strong and effective workplace culture.
[00:31:03] Sameer Srivastava: The Culture Kit Podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business and it’s produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode online so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too!
[00:31:22] Jennifer Chatman: I'm Jenny.
[00:31:24] Sameer Srivastava: And I'm Sameer.
[00:31:25] Jennifer Chatman: We'll be back soon with more tools for your culture kit.