What's your point? That you shouldn't try to filter candidates for culture fit because your methods for doing so might be flawed?
Sure, anything done badly enough can be worse than not doing it, but that is a completely obvious and irrelevant assertion. It's still important to filter for culture fit.
> No, it really isn't. If you have professionals on your team, they will be able to work together.
Okay, would it feel more comfortable if we interviewed for "professionalism" instead of "culture fit"? Fully realizing that standards of professionalism are different for each company and team within a company, i.e. that professional standards are part of a team's culture?
> And once again, most places are using "culture fit" as a way to say, "Not like me", and using it to enable discriminatory hiring practices.
That is true sometimes, but not always.
More to the point, tightening the politically correctness standards of language around the problem does absolutely nothing to prevent discrimination--it just makes discrimination harder to identify. And in the process you're throwing out the idea that sometimes people aren't likely to get along--which is not a function of race/gender/class/etc. If you think someone is using "cultural fit" as an excuse for discrimination, the solution is to call them out for that, not to pretend that "cultural fit" doesn't describe a real phenomenon. What makes you think that a bigot can't say that someone isn't technically qualified in order to exclude them?
A perfect example of this: I said someone wasn't a cultural fit a year ago, but I was outvoted because of his technical abilities. Four months later he was fired for groping the administrative assistant, and afterward, more incidents came to light. Do you think that my workplace was more or less discriminatory because we hired someone without regard to his cultural fit?
