Culture Data for Data Teams: A Smarter Way to Hire and Lead

AI projects are inherently collaborative. They require individuals with diverse technical expertise who can work with others cohesively. While it might be obvious to assess technical skills, cultural fit is foundational to collaboration, innovation, and the long-term success of your team.

Hiring the wrong candidate can derail projects, waste resources, and harm team morale. Skilled interviewing reduces the risk of poor hires by evaluating both competence and cultural fit effectively.

Specialists in recruiting and interviewing have contributed more to this topic than I ever will. My goal is not to duplicate their great work, but to highlight one thing we did at a previous company that made a foundational difference in hiring and retaining the right people—especially for data-driven teams.

That one thing is the CVT-based culture interview.

What the heck is a CVT?

The Career Valuation Tool (CVT) is a written questionnaire that gathers data on seven key motivations, recognizing that a person’s ideals may shift based on life circumstances, age, or financial stability. The responses help to identify what employees ideally seek and how well their current role aligns with those expectations.

After an individual completes a CVT, we use the responses to facilitate a structured dialogue to understand what drives them and how well the organization meets their needs. This information gives the leadership team powerful insight—not based on gut feel, but on real data.

Like many of the cultural practices in my previous business, the CVT comes from Adapt. If you decide to use Adapt, tell them I sent you! (I get no financial benefit—I just like sharing the love.)

How it works

We ask individuals to complete a CVT every 3–4 months. We then have a conversation about the results. These conversations are typically led by a cultural lead—usually a founder in our businesses.

When interviewing a new candidate, the CVT is the first step in our process. I send it in advance and schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss their responses.

Each CVT asks seven key questions, like: “How well does the role make use of your skills and future aspirations?”

We ask people to rate each question in two ways:

1. Ideal Rating: How important is this motivation to you? (Allocate 100 points across the seven categories.)
2. Current Role Rating: How well is this being fulfilled in your current or most recent role?

This forces a relative evaluation—something most self-assessments miss.

For example, someone might allocate 20 points to "Professional Fit" and then rate their current job as only fulfilling that at a 14. That gap opens up a meaningful conversation: “What would it take for that to be a 20?”

Why it works for data teams

Data teams value systems, trends, and objective measurement. The CVT provides a structured, data-informed approach to understanding cultural alignment. Over time, we collected CVTs across our team and started to spot trends:

• Individuals who blamed others for low scores often signaled poor cultural fit.
• Employees who consistently rated "growth opportunities" low became at-risk for churn.
• Team-wide shifts in scoring helped us anticipate morale dips or misalignments before they became performance issues.

With this data, we made better hiring decisions, improved team health, and had early-warning indicators for when someone might be disengaging.

Our hiring process

1. Culture Interview (CVT-based): Candidate completes the CVT in advance. During the interview, we use their responses as the basis for structured, reflective dialogue. This helps us assess culture fit and shared values.
2. Practical Interview: Led by the hiring manager and a senior team member, this session focuses on technical and functional competency.
3. Simulated Work Exercise: A paid task approximating core job responsibilities. We do this together to observe both quality and collaboration.
4. Team Social Fit: An informal setting, like a virtual or in-person team gathering, to assess interpersonal dynamics.

Even in large companies...

I get it, HR is there to help you focus on delivering.  But how can you lead a high-performance team if you don’t have any influence on your team’s culture?

If you're in a big company and don’t own the hiring process, you can still apply aspects of this. Use the CVT informally. Start a trend in your own team. Build culture data within your circle of influence.

Are you doing this?  I’d love to hear from you if you’re implementing a different approach to building the culture of your team inside a larger organization. Just drop me an email with your story.

Start using the CVT

If you’d like to try the CVT, check out Adapt. I have no commercial relationship with them—just genuine respect for the tool.

If you're using data to drive technical decisions, why not use it to build a stronger culture as well?

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