Finding the right architecture or design professional isn’t just about technical expertise. Just as important is to ensure they align with your firm’s values, work style, and creative vision. When they do, they’ll integrate seamlessly into your team and contribute to a positive workplace environment. 

Finding someone who fits that definition isn’t always easy, though–and searching for them can take a lot of time and resources. While the average hire takes 44 days, it can take much longer to find candidates with niche skills or leadership experience. The same is true for recruitment costs, which average $4,700 per hire for individual contributors, and upwards of $28,000 for executive roles. After making that kind of investment in architecture recruitment, you want to hire the right person the first time. 

In this post, we’ll explore architecture firm hiring best practices to find candidates who are a perfect fit for your culture, from how you evaluate their resume and portfolio to key questions to ask during the interview. By the end, you’ll learn how to hire architects and designers who are an ideal fit for your firm by prioritizing cultural alignment.

How is cultural fit defined?

Before you can conduct a cultural fit assessment, it helps to understand exactly what it is and how it is usually defined. The term “cultural fit” typically describes how well a candidate’s behavior, personality, values, and work style align with the environment, standards, and identity of the organization. By evaluating cultural fit in hiring, firms can better identify whether a candidate is likely to thrive in their workplace and contribute positively to their mission and workplace dynamics.

There are several factors that contribute to an architecture firm culture fit, including:

• Values alignment – When a candidate shares and embodies your core architecture practice values, they are more likely to find meaning and satisfaction in their work. This translates to a better sense of belonging and likely longer retention.  
• Work style compatibility – Some firms prioritize flexibility and autonomy, while others focus more on teamwork and structure. Candidates will often have preferences along these spectra for their ideal design studio work style.
• Communication style – Effective communication is critical for design team collaboration and project success. Some people prefer direct, fast-paced communication, while others prefer language that is more diplomatic or formal. Similarly, some people prefer to communicate via text while others prefer phone calls, video calls, or face-to-face interactions. All of these factors influence your culture by impacting how team members interact.
• Attitude toward teamwork – In some firms, they have a collaborative design environment, expecting close collaboration at every step. In others, employees work more independently. Assessing the candidate’s preferred level of interaction is crucial when hiring architects to ensure they fit the dynamics of the team.
• Leadership style – Leaders set the tone for communication, decision making, and overall workplace dynamics. This makes leadership style one of the most influential factors shaping workplace culture in design. Whether a candidate prefers a hierarchical leadership structure or one that’s flat and decentralized will have a significant impact on how well they fit into a given company’s culture.
• Workplace environment fit – A creative workplace environment can often vary more than those in other sectors. This can include everything from the office layout to policies on remote work, dress codes, or other day-to-day details.

There is obviously a lot of overlap between these areas—an organization’s work environment and typical work style are often closely aligned, for instance, and will frequently also relate to their communication style and the leadership approach used. As a rule, though, these are the key areas to consider when evaluating culture fit during architecture recruitment.

Defining your firm’s culture

The first thing to remember is that every company has a culture, whether or not its leadership has taken the time to officially define it. In companies where the culture is intentionally cultivated, defining it is fairly straightforward: you simply assess the guiding principles used to develop that culture. 

In organizations where the culture has developed more organically, architecture firm cultural assessment can be more of a challenge. Yet this is a critical step—after all, you can’t effectively assess a candidate’s architectural design team compatibility if you don’t understand the culture they need to fit within.

The good news is, there are a few steps you can take to articulate your culture. These include:

1. Clearly define your purpose, mission, and core values. These are the guiding principles that serve as the foundation of your culture. Ask yourself what the company stands for in a big picture sense, and what behaviors or beliefs are non-negotiable on your team.
2. Conduct employee surveys, interviews, or focus groups. Employees live within your architecture firm work culture on a day-to-day basis and often have a deep understanding of it as a result. Talking to them can help you see how the culture is perceived and whether the actual culture aligns with the ideal culture you ideally want to have in place.  
3. Review company policies, leadership behaviors, and workplace norms. These are the established, codified sources of your culture, and often contain valuable insights into how that culture is exemplified on an everyday basis.
4. Define your key cultural pillars. This lets you establish the behaviors and mindsets that govern interactions in your workplace. Do teams work closely in your firm, or is autonomy prioritized? Do you encourage innovation or are you more risk-averse? What is the firm’s approach to flexibility and employee well-being? Answering these questions can help to establish the core tenets of your culture.
5. Interrogate leadership and management practices. Leaders play a crucial role in both establishing and reinforcing the culture. Consider how decisions are made, how authority and responsibility are assigned, and how leaders in your organization communicate with reports, provide feedback on their work, and otherwise engage with their teams.

Taking the time to fully clarify your culture before you start recruiting architects and designers can help ensure you’re looking for candidates who will be a good fit for it.

Pre-hiring assessments for culture

While early stages of the design hiring process often focus primarily on skills and experience, there are ways to work cultural fit assessment in before you get to one-on-one interviews. This can help to improve the efficiency of your architecture and design talent acquisition, ensuring that you focus your time and energy on candidates who are most likely to be a good match. 

These kinds of pre-hiring assessments fall into a few different categories, each of which will be useful for assessing a different aspect of candidates. Bear in mind that you won’t want to use all of them at once—requiring too many assessments from candidates can cause them to drop out of your talent pipeline, potentially leading to you missing out on top talent. Instead, it’s best to pick the one or two tests that you feel will be most valuable in your design agency hiring process.

Here are some of the most popular assessments to explore. 

Personality assessments

These tests evaluate a candidate’s behavioral tendencies and traits, and can also give employers a general sense of the individual’s work style. Some popular personality tests used for hiring design professionals include:

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) – This test assigns individuals to one of 16 personality types, built based on where they fall along four spectra: Extraversion vs. introversion; sensing vs. intuition; thinking vs. feeling; and judging vs. perceiving. Overall, it assesses personality preferences related to teamwork, communication, and decision-making.
• Big Five Personality Test (OCEAN Model) – This test measures individuals in five areas: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Overall, the result provides a snapshot of their likely workplace behavior.
• DISC Personality Assessment – This test is designed to identify which of four main behavioral styles an individual aligns to, measuring four traits: Dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. It is a useful test for assessing how the individual will likely impact team dynamics.

Work style and values assessments

These tests are designed to evaluate the candidate’s approach to work and decision-making. Many of them do evaluate personality types similar to the tests listed above, but through the lens of how they impact workplace behavior specifically. Popular models include:

• SHL Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ32) – This test measures individuals’ personality traits in relation to team compatibility and workplace performance.
• Predictive Index (PI) Behavioral Assessment – This test is used to measure and analyze what underlying factors drive a candidate’s behavior, including dominance, extraversion, patience, and formality.
• Culture Index – This assessment tool evaluates candidates’ work-related personality traits and behaviors, with the aim of assessing how their natural tendencies align with the company culture or the needs of their specific role.

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs)

The two categories above are focused on analyzing the core personality traits of candidates, but Situational Judgment Tests take a different approach. In these assessments, applicants are presented with workplace scenarios, with the purpose of evaluating how they react to challenges or ethical dilemmas.

Because these are more specific to a workplace, many employers develop their own customized SJT tests to employ in their design firm recruitment strategies. There are services that can develop and conduct these kinds of assessments for you, however. One popular option is Harver, which offers SJTs tailored to your company culture or the job role you’re hiring into.

Cognitive and emotional intelligence tests

The line between personality and cognitive ability often blurs, but these are separate aspects of an individual’s behavior and actions. Administering cognitive or emotional intelligence assessments can be valuable in architecture and design recruitment, evaluating qualities like adaptability, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. 

Cognitive ability tests tend to focus on problem-solving, and are best for revealing how well candidates will adapt to the pace of work in your firm and the challenges they’re likely to face in their roles.

For gauging qualities like self-awareness, empathy, and interpersonal skills, an emotional intelligence assessment will be the better fit. The most popular assessment for this is the Emotional Quotient Inventory 2.0 (EQ-i 2.0) test. This is a scientifically validated assessment that evaluates how well individuals perceive, understand, and manage emotions in both themselves and others.

Can you assess cultural fit from a candidate’s resume and portfolio?

While the primary purpose of these documents is to assess technical skills, they also reflect the candidate’s work style, values, and design philosophy. This can make them useful to assess cultural fit in architecture firms.

Pay attention to keywords related to your values, like innovation or sustainability. Note whether they mention team-based projects or cross-disciplinary work, or if they have experience in leadership roles. You can also research the firms or clients they’ve worked with in the past. If those organizations have a similar culture to yours, that is a strong sign the client will be equally successful in your company. 

You can also gain insights from the projects the candidate has worked on in the past and how they’re presented in their portfolio. If they’ve worked on different types of projects this shows flexibility and adaptability. A portfolio that is polished, professional, and organized demonstrates attention to detail and the ability to communicate ideas clearly.

Interview questions and techniques to assess cultural fit

While assessments can be helpful in evaluating design professionals for team compatibility, the interview stage is often where you’ll be best able to assess candidates’ fitness for your culture. This gives you the chance to see the individual’s personality and communication style, as well as to hear more about their past experience and how they respond to different situations within the workplace.

In the sections that follow, you’ll find some effective cultural fit interview questions for architects. Think about your core values when you’re choosing which questions to use, and focus on questions that give you insights into these areas. During the interview, don’t only pay attention to the content of their response but also note their body language, tone, and whether they seem comfortable and engaged with the question. These non-verbal cues can give you additional insights when you’re conducting an architecture workplace culture interview.

Behavioral interview questions for culture alignment

• Tell me about a time you worked on a project with a diverse team of designers, engineers, or clients. How did you ensure effective collaboration?
• When you have been part of a team with conflicting design opinions, how did you resolve those discrepancies to come to a consensus?
• Describe a time when an unexpected change in project scope or requirements forced you to pivot. How did you handle it?
• Have you worked on projects that required significant adaptation to new technology or regulations? How did you approach them?
• What strategies have you used in the past to persuade a stakeholder to accept a design change? Were those strategies effective?
• What is your approach to managing difficult client expectations? Can you tell me about a time that approach was effective?
• What type of work environment allows you to be the most creative and productive? Can you describe a time you thrived in that kind of setting?
• How do you maintain work-life balance when facing long hours or tight deadlines?
• Describe a situation where you saw a colleague acting unethically. How did you address it?
• Can you share an example of how you’ve contributed to a supportive and inclusive team environment in a past role?
• Can you describe a time when you went above and beyond to meet a client’s expectations? What drove you to do this?

Situational questions for testing real-world fit

• Imagine you’re working on a project with a multidisciplinary team and a disagreement arises about the design direction. What steps would you take to find a resolution?
• If a senior architect asked you to revise a design multiple times with little explanation, how would you respond?
• What would you do if a critical material for a project became unavailable at the last minute? How would you find a solution without compromising the design vision?
• Imagine you’re working on a project and discover a regulation you weren’t aware of that affects the design. How would you approach the issue?
• If you were juggling multiple projects and a colleague asked for help, how would you respond and prioritize your workload?
• If you noticed a colleague who is struggling with their work but hesitant to ask for help, how would you respond?
• How would you approach your work if assigned a project with a very short timeline and minimal direction?
• If a client is hesitant about incorporating sustainable design elements due to cost concerns, how would you persuade them of the long-term benefits?
• How would you contribute to the culture in a firm that emphasizes mentorship and knowledge-sharing?

Soft skill assessments in job interviews

Soft skills aren’t just key for job success when hiring architecture professionals but can also be a significant factor in how well the individual fits with your culture. Many of the questions above can give you insights into soft skills like problem-solving, communication, and teamwork, but you can also develop questions that directly address these critical aspects of cultural fit. Here are some examples of questions that you can use to assess some of the most commonly sought-after soft skills for design recruitment.

Communication

• Can you describe a time you had to explain a complex technical concept to a non-technical stakeholder?
• Describe a time a miscommunication led to a challenge on a project. How did you resolve it?
• What steps do you take to ensure you fully understand a client’s vision and requirements before you start the design process?

Collaboration and teamwork

• What do you believe makes a great team dynamic in an architecture firm?
• Tell me about a time that you had to mediate a disagreement between two team members. How did you approach it?
• How do you balance independent work with collaboration in an architecture project?

Creativity and innovation

• What is the most innovative design solution you’ve come up with, and what inspired it?
• How do you stay inspired and develop fresh ideas for your designs?
• Tell me about a time you experimented with a new design technique or material. What was the outcome?

Problem solving

• Walk me through your process for prioritizing tasks in a complex or multi-stage project.
• Describe a time you had to work within strict budget constraints. How did you maintain quality while staying on budget?
• Tell me about a time a project faced delays due to unforeseen obstacles. How did you keep things on track?

Adaptability

• How do you handle unexpected changes in design direction or project scope?
• Tell me about a project where something went wrong. How did you adapt and find a solution?
• What’s your approach to staying current with industry trends and technology? Can you share a time you applied new technology or techniques in your work?

Emotional intelligence

• Tell me about a time you received negative feedback on a design. How did you react, and what did you learn from the experience?
• When you need to understand a client or colleague’s perspective that is very different from your own, how do you ensure that you are being empathetic?
• Can you describe a situation where you recognized that you were getting frustrated or stressed during a project? How did you manage your emotions?

Beyond the interview: Internships, trial periods, and probationary hires

Architecture firm hiring strategies for cultural alignment don’t need to be limited to pre-hire assessments and interviews. Offering internships or trial employment periods can let you see how a professional engages with your team and workplace in the real world. In other words, you don’t have to guess whether they fit the culture—you’ll be able to see it first-hand.

The bottom line is that workplace culture in architecture is critical to ensure a harmonious team environment and the successful completion of your clients’ projects. It is worth the time and effort to ensure that your new hire is a good fit.