Culture Add test

The test is made by a subject-matter expert

Otto V.

Otto worked at Bain & Company for 13 years and served as a Partner in Bain's Amsterdam office. He specializes in customer strategy and marketing, growth strategies, and change management. He supported mainly retail banks, telecom companies, and agrifood businesses.

Otto has been involved in recruiting throughout his career and led Bain's Associate Recruiting department for a number of years. He is one of TestGorilla's co-founders, focusing on test development, product, and technology.

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What is the Culture Add test?

Our Culture Add test is a multiple-choice pre-interview assessment designed to help you hire for culture in an objective, measurable, and repeatable way. 

It assesses how well your candidate’s underlying values align with the ethos of your business based on your answers to a quick survey about: 

1. The values that apply across your organization

2. The behaviors you’re looking for in the role 

Here’s how it works:

How does the Culture Add test work?

When completing the survey, you’re asked to rate a range of values based on how important they are to your organization as a whole. These include values like: 

• Achievement

• Equality

• Independence

These apply to your whole company and, therefore, can be kept the same when hiring for any role.

Remember: Only give a top rating to values that set you apart from competitors. That way, the candidates that align with your most important values are more likely to stand out.

Next, repeat the process, but this time for the behaviors most important to success in the specific role you’re hiring for. Examples include: 

• Analytical

• Diligent

• Helpful

When candidates take the Culture Add test, they are asked to rate the values most important to them and the behaviors they exhibit, choosing from a list that includes your selection. Their results show how well their values map onto your priorities and where they deviate.

Why is a Cultural Add test important to employers?

A strong culture can boost engagement, retention, adaptability, and innovation by creating a supportive environment where employees and leaders are motivated to reach common goals. 

On the contrary, companies with weak and stagnant cultures experience: 

• Rifts between leadership and employees

• A high turnover rate as a result of employee unhappiness

• Sinking profits

Adding a Culture Add test to your recruitment process can help you create diverse teams and a strong culture by limiting the effects of unconscious bias on your assessment of candidates’ values.

This prevents you from creating a homogeneous workforce filled with new hires who think similarly, which often leads to a status quo with stifled problem-solving, creativity, and innovation.

Why should you pick culture add over culture fit?

A cultural add test is better at creating a strong company culture than a cultural fit assessment because cultural fit tests generally focus on more superficial characteristics.

Take the classic “beer test,” where an interviewer decides if they would get a beer with a candidate. This is a common cultural fit test, but it backfires because it is: 

• Subjective, being based on one person’s opinion 

• Superficial, relying on the individual’s perceived personality traits

• Biased, leading hiring managers to gravitate toward similar demographics 

• Irrelevant to the deeper motivations underlying the work at hand

By contrast, a culture add hiring strategy identifies applicants who share your company’s deeper motivations while also bringing new competencies, approaches, and life experiences to the table.

Our Culture Add test is especially powerful when used in conjunction with other skills-based hiring and personality tests.

With this insight in hand after the screening stage, you can then use interviews to probe further into applicants’ motivations and ethos during the interview process with culture add interview questions.

Create a multi-measure assessment: 4 tests to pair with the Culture Add test

Here are four assessments you can use alongside the Culture Add test to hire the best talent for your open roles:

• The English C1 (Advanced) test ensures language barriers don’t get in the way of your company culture by measuring applicants’ English fluency 

• The Numerical Reasoning test assesses how well candidates process numerical information and basic math concepts 

• The Business Judgment test evaluates individuals’ decision-making abilities in a business context – for example, whether they know how to approach strategic decision-making 

• The Big Five (OCEAN) test examines candidates’ expression of five different personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism

Note: We haven’t included any role-specific skills tests here because they depend on the position you’re hiring for. However, we highly recommend you add at least one in your five-test assessment to ensure your candidates possess the right skills for the job.