Most businesses say they hire for culture fit. In practice, many of them are hiring for rapport.
The culture-fit interview usually comes late in the process. The candidate meets the managing director or the wider team, conversation flows, and everyone comes away saying they “just clicked”. It feels like due diligence. Often it is just a measure of how similar the candidate is to the people in the room.
Likability is not the same as fit
A Sales Director who is easy company can still be a poor fit. If your business makes decisions slowly and by consensus, a fast, autonomous operator will be frustrated within months, however well the lunch went. The reverse is true too: someone a little awkward in the room might match the way your business really works almost perfectly.
Gut feel also has a habit of favouring people with the same background, the same humour and the same view of the world. That narrows the field and rarely improves the hire.
Define fit before you assess it
Real fit is about values and behaviours: how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, what happens under pressure, how failure is treated and what is truly rewarded. Those things can be described, and candidates can be assessed against them using real, recent examples rather than impressions.
That is why I profile how a client organisation actually behaves, not how it describes itself, and assess every candidate on the same eight dimensions of fit. The gap between the two tells you far more than whether you would enjoy their company.
Liking your new Sales Director is a bonus. Working the same way is the point.