Most creative teams that say they hire for cultural fit are really hiring for familiarity, and a portfolio review plus a chat over coffee is the machine that produces it. If you want a creative team that makes better work, you have to replace "do I like this person" with a structured test of how they collaborate and how they think, scored against criteria you wrote down before anyone walked in. That's the whole argument of this piece. Everything below is the reasoning behind it.
I came to this from the PR side, where I spent twelve years building and running account teams at London agencies. Pitch teams are creative teams in miniature. Strategists, copywriters, designers, a producer who somehow holds it together. And the hires I watched go wrong almost never went wrong on talent.
Why a portfolio tells you less than you think
A portfolio shows the output. It doesn't show how many rounds of client feedback sat between the first idea and the final one, who actually made the call on the typeface, or whether the candidate fought for the good idea or quietly folded.
The work in a book is also a group photograph. Anyone who's run a campaign knows the person credited on the case study and the person who rescued it at 11pm aren't always the same. So the first move is to treat the portfolio as a prompt for questions, not a verdict.
Ask the candidate to walk you through one piece of work they're proud of and one that went badly. Listen for the pronouns. Listen for what they say about the people they worked with. That's your first real data on collaboration style, and it costs you nothing.
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The trouble with the phrase itself
"Cultural fit" has a habit of meaning "reminds me of us". I've sat in debrief meetings where a perfectly strong candidate was marked down because they were "a bit quiet" or "didn't have the energy", which in practice meant they didn't perform enthusiasm the way the interviewer did. Introverts, neurodivergent candidates and people who'd learned to read a room differently in a different culture all get filtered out this way.
The Equality Act 2010 doesn't care what you call it. If "fit" decisions track protected characteristics, even by accident, you've got a problem, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance on recruitment is worth a read before you redesign anything. CIPD also publishes plenty on inclusive recruitment practice if you want something more operational.
The fix isn't to drop the idea of fit. A team with no shared way of working falls apart. The fix is to define it as behaviours you can observe, not as a feeling.
Define fit as how people work, then score it
Before you advertise the role, write down three or four working behaviours the team genuinely needs. Not values on a wall. Behaviours. How does this team handle critique? Do they present rough work early or only polished work? Who makes the final call when two good ideas collide? How do they brief each other?
Then build questions that surface those behaviours and score every candidate against the same anchors. This is where most agencies and in-house teams I've worked with stall, because it feels bureaucratic and it kills the fun of the gut-feel interview. It also works. Two interviewers scoring independently, before they talk to each other, catches a remarkable amount of bias, mostly because the first person to speak in a debrief usually sets the room's opinion.
Useful questions tend to be about a specific past situation. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a creative director and what happened next. Describe the last time you changed your mind about a concept because of someone else's input. What do you do when the brief is wrong?
The answers show process. They also show whether someone can disagree without drama, which is worth more on a creative team than a stunning reel.
Test the collaboration, not just the candidate
A short paid working session beats a take-home test almost every time. Give the candidate a real, small problem and put them in a room with two future colleagues for sixty minutes. You're not looking for a finished idea. You're watching how they build on someone else's half-thought, how they handle being interrupted, whether they ask a good question before they start talking.
Pay them. Unpaid creative tests quietly screen out anyone who can't afford to donate a weekend, which skews your shortlist towards the already comfortable. It's also just a bad look.
Give every candidate the same problem, the same people and the same scoring sheet. That sounds obvious. It's amazing how often the second candidate gets a different panel because someone was on holiday.
The strongest objection
The best argument against all this is that creativity isn't procedural. Great teams are chemistry, the objection goes, and chemistry can't go in a spreadsheet. Score everyone against anchors and you'll hire competent, agreeable people who never surprise you.
I'll give that half its due. Rigid scoring can flatten a team if the criteria are lazy, and a panel that rewards smooth interview answers will end up with a lot of smooth interviewers. Some of the best creatives I've worked with interviewed badly.
But the objection assumes the alternative is chemistry, and it usually isn't. The alternative is the interviewer's comfort, which is a much worse proxy. Structure doesn't remove judgement. It moves it from "did I enjoy the hour" to "did this person show the behaviours we need", and it leaves room for the wildcard: build one open question into every interview that isn't scored, and let the panel argue about it afterwards.
Where this goes next
Hiring managers are already being pushed to justify decisions, and the tooling is catching up. Video-first applications, for instance, let a panel review how a candidate explains their thinking before anyone is in a room, which is one reason OHUB's video-first recruitment tools have found a following among creative employers. Anonymised first-round review is another practical step, and OHUB's diversity hiring resources cover how to set that up without wrecking your timeline.
The harder shift is cultural in the proper sense. Teams that can articulate how they work, in plain words, are the ones that will hire well and keep people. Can yours do that yet? If the answer takes longer than a minute, that's your first task, before the next brief lands.
