I think cultural fit is frequently used as a stand-in for bias, but there are other important cultural factors beyond just ability to communicate that can effect how well someone will do in a job.
Legitimate cultural fit things usually have to do with how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication. If you have a team that tends to assign some individual work and communicates through PRs, that's going to be a cultural shock (and maybe a bad fit) for someone who comes from an environment with regular pairing / pair switching / mobbing and more in-person discussion of specific code decisions.
In general, there's a balance between individual autonomy and team cohesion that I think can come down to cultural preferences, and it's good to find people who can fit well into a specific team's environment. As someone who highly values individual autonomy in things like tool and language choice, code style, etc. I've been put in teams that culturally were much more in favor of cohesion and I was deeply unhappy- and now I try to filter for that in all of my own interviews.
None of that should have to do with candidates liking the same movies or beer as the exiting team, or any other sort of bias inducing "cultural fit" questions, and too often they end up conflated, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to cultural fit.
I find some of those items strange strange such as "how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication"
That's just doing the job. If company does X, then I do X.
I know folks have strong opinions on it but I've found there are many ways to do various tasks and as long as everyone works together in an expected manner... it's my job to do it that way.
Legitimate cultural fit things usually have to do with how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication. If you have a team that tends to assign some individual work and communicates through PRs, that's going to be a cultural shock (and maybe a bad fit) for someone who comes from an environment with regular pairing / pair switching / mobbing and more in-person discussion of specific code decisions.
In general, there's a balance between individual autonomy and team cohesion that I think can come down to cultural preferences, and it's good to find people who can fit well into a specific team's environment. As someone who highly values individual autonomy in things like tool and language choice, code style, etc. I've been put in teams that culturally were much more in favor of cohesion and I was deeply unhappy- and now I try to filter for that in all of my own interviews.
None of that should have to do with candidates liking the same movies or beer as the exiting team, or any other sort of bias inducing "cultural fit" questions, and too often they end up conflated, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to cultural fit.