The Culture Interview
Derive hiring attributes from who actually succeeded at your company, then test for them
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Hinge's fifth principle, 'people with heart', operationalised into a repeatable hiring gate. Rather than importing generic competencies, McLeod's team looked backwards at who had succeeded at Hinge and who hadn't, extracted the attributes that separated them, then designed a standardised interview that assesses for exactly those attributes — a stage every single hire still passes through. The values it tests for are authenticity, courage and empathy, deliberately held as a trifecta because any one without the others becomes imbalanced. The claimed result is a sharp drop in first-year quits and firings and extraordinarily low voluntary attrition, on the logic that people surrounded by others who share their values want to stay.
Origin
Hinge made a lot of hiring mistakes early on. The team applied the same method they'd used to build the culture principles — look at who succeeded, look at who didn't, extract the attributes — and turned the output into a formal interview stage.
Core principles
- 01Your hiring bar should be derived from your own success and failure data, not borrowed.
- 02Authenticity, courage and empathy work as a trifecta; each alone is imbalanced.
- 03Authenticity without empathy is just rudeness.
- 04Authenticity plus empathy is what builds trust, and trust is the lifeblood of an organisation.
- 05Values-aligned people cluster: hire for values and retention follows.
How to run it
- 1
List who succeeded and who didn't
Take the people who have thrived at your company and the people who haven't, and write out the attributes of each group.
Pro tip This is the same look-backwards method Hinge used to derive its culture principles — reuse it.
Watch out Guard against confusing attributes with background; you're looking for behaviour, not pedigree.
- 2
Distil the attributes into core values
Compress the attribute lists into a small set of values — Hinge landed on authenticity, courage and empathy.
Pro tip Check each value against its own excess: what does too much of this look like without the others?
- 3
Design a dedicated interview that assesses for them
Build a separate culture interview whose only job is to assess those attributes, distinct from the skills assessment.
Watch out It only works if it is genuinely a gate — at Hinge everyone still goes through it.
- 4
Measure it on first-year outcomes
Track whether new hires quit or are fired within their first year, and watch voluntary attrition as the signal that the gate is working.
Pro tip Voluntary attrition is the sharper signal — values-aligned people stay because they feel aligned with their colleagues.
In the wild
After a run of early hiring mistakes, Hinge built the culture interview from its own success/failure attribute analysis and made it mandatory for every candidate.
→ A dramatic increase in people staying past the first year, and extraordinarily low voluntary attrition.
Common mistakes
Hiring on skills alone in the early days
McLeod says Hinge made a whole lot of hiring mistakes in the beginning, before there was any structured assessment of the attributes that actually predicted success there.
Prizing bluntness as authenticity
Authenticity without empathy produces people who are rude and mean; the values only function as a set.
Is it for you?
Best for
Companies past their first dozen hires that have enough internal history to see who thrives and who doesn't.
Not ideal for
Brand-new teams with no track record to mine, or roles hired purely on demonstrable technical output.
From the transcript
“who are the people who have succeeded at Hinge? What are their attributes?”
“now we have extraordinarily low attrition at Hinge, especially voluntary attrition”
“Our three core values are authenticity, and courage, and empathy.”
“trust like within an organization is really the lifeblood of the organization”
From the episode
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Justin McLeod