Hiring for Cultural Fit: The Framework Used at King (Activision Blizzard)

“Cultural fit” is the most-misused phrase in recruiting. Done right, it means hiring people who share the company’s values and purpose. Done wrong, it means hiring another person who looks, sounds, and thinks like the people already on the team. That’s how teams get less diverse over time and call it “culture.”

Gary Manning, TA Lead at King (the studio behind Candy Crush, owned by Activision Blizzard), runs a low-cost framework for getting cultural fit right without falling into the bias trap. The frame he uses: “We’re not trying to hire clones. We’re trying to get people who share in our purpose and our values, and doing things in the way that we think they should be done.”

The King framework covers the six-stage hiring process, the values + capability matrix, the PAL interview methodology, the talent quadrant for the wash-up, and the unconscious bias safeguards that keep “values fit” from collapsing into “people like us.” If you’re already running a structured screening process, read The perfect screening call script first. The cultural fit work sits on top of that.

The Six-Stage King Hiring Process

In short: Manning’s framework breaks hiring into six stages: kickoff (briefing), sourcing, interview briefing, wash-up (debrief), health check, and offer/onboarding. The discipline is that every stage has an explicit purpose and explicit owners, and the values + capability decision happens at the wash-up, not in someone’s head between stages.

Manning’s process at King:

Stage	What happens	Who’s involved
Kickoff	Up to a 1-hour briefing on the role. New roles take longer. Goal: a really thorough brief so “we know we’re going to get it right from the start.”	Recruiter + hiring manager
Sourcing	Standard sourcing, the same as most teams.	Recruiter
Interview briefing	Brief the interview panel so they know what to look for. Each interviewer is assigned values or capability coverage.	Recruiter + interview panel
Wash-up	All interviewers come back together to discuss feedback on the candidates who made it through. Decide as a group.	Full panel
Health check	A few weeks after kickoff, the team double-checks: are we still on track? If off-track, how do we course-correct?	Recruiter + hiring manager
Offer / onboarding	Standard offer and onboarding.	Recruiter + hiring manager

Two of these stages do most of the cultural-fit work: the interview briefing (so each interviewer knows whether they’re testing for values or capability) and the wash-up (so the decision is made as a group with evidence, not by one person’s gut feel).

Manning’s claim about why this matters: “If we got the kickoff right and we had an interview briefing, then hopefully at the end of that we would have found the right candidate, and everyone can provide feedback in the right way for us.”

The two-step pre-load (kickoff brief plus interview briefing) is how you make sure interviewers aren’t all asking the same questions and missing entire dimensions of the candidate. Each panel member gets a coverage area. This is also where a structured rubric pays off; we’ve covered the hiring manager kickoff in detail in How to be a successful recruiter in 2026.

What “Cultural Fit” Actually Means at King

In short: Manning defines cultural fit as values alignment, not personality alignment. The test isn’t “would I get a beer with this person” but “do they identify with our values and display behaviors that fit how we want work done.” Values are deep, behaviors are surface, and interviewers have to probe past the surface to the driver.

The misuse of cultural fit is this: someone scores a candidate as “not a culture fit” because the candidate didn’t laugh at the same jokes, didn’t follow the same football team, or didn’t wear the same kind of clothes. That’s not culture. That’s similarity bias wearing a culture-fit costume.

Manning’s working definition: cultural fit means values alignment. King has five defined values, each with a written definition of the behaviors that go with it. Every interviewer is trained to probe for evidence of those behaviors during the interview, and to bring that evidence to the wash-up.

The metaphor he uses is the iceberg:

• Behaviors are above the waterline. These are the things you can see in an interview: gregariousness, confidence, communication style. They’re easy to read but also easy to fake or misread.
• Beliefs, values, capabilities, and purpose are under the waterline. They drive the behaviors but aren’t visible directly. Good interviewing gets to them.

The goal of an interview, in Manning’s framing, is to “go deeper and under the surface” to figure out what’s driving the visible behaviors, and whether those drivers will produce the behaviors you want once the candidate is on the team.

A practical implication: if your interview panel only ever discusses surface behavior (“she was so confident, she’d be great”), you don’t have a values assessment. You have a personality assessment, which is what creates the “hire people like me” trap.

The PAL Interview Methodology

In short: PAL is King’s adaptation of STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) with explicit Learning added at the end. The funnel structure forces interviewers to spend more time at the top, defining the problem in detail, and finishes with what the candidate learned, which is itself a values check (humility, openness).

STAR is the standard behavioral-interview structure: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Manning’s team uses PAL, a funnel-shaped variant that adds Learning explicitly:

• P (Problem). Spend most of the time here. “What was the problem? What’s the size of the problem? How much data did you have? Who was involved? What was your part in this?”
• A (Action). What did they actually do?
• L (Learning). What did they take away? “If they didn’t learn anything from it, then we can probably link that back to one of our values around humility or openness.”

Why the funnel matters: candidates have rehearsed standard interview questions. They’ve watched the videos. They’ve practiced the STAR answer for “tell me about a time you solved a problem with no data.” Manning’s frame: “they give you a straightforward answer because maybe they’ve researched how to answer questions, and it sounds great. But you need to take a step back and say, OK, well, what’s the problem? What’s the size of the problem? What’s the size of the data?”

The probing at the top of the funnel does two things:

1. It forces specificity, which is harder to fake than a polished narrative.
2. It surfaces values evidence the candidate didn’t realize was being tested. The Learning question, in particular, isn’t a soft wrap-up. It’s the values test for humility, openness, and growth.

If you’re building structured interview question banks, the next post in the cluster, Interview questions that reveal top performers, pairs cleanly with this methodology.

The Values × Capability Matrix (The Wash-Up Decision)

In short: At the wash-up, every candidate gets plotted on a 2x2 grid: values (low/high) on one axis, capability (low/high) on the other. Manning’s hard rule: avoid the high-capability/low-values quadrant entirely. Disruptive talent costs more than it produces.

The decision tool King uses at the wash-up is a four-box matrix:

Quadrant	Values	Capability	Decision
Box 1	High	Low	Hire if you can train them up; otherwise, talent pool for next year
Box 2	High	High	The hire. Make the offer.
Box 3	Low	Low	No use. Don’t hire.
Box 4 (the danger zone)	Low	High	Avoid. Disruptive; costs more than they produce.

Manning’s specific warning on Box 4, the high-capability, low-values quadrant, is worth quoting:

“I’d always recommend avoiding the green box. Because this person could probably be very good at what they do, but how they do it is not necessarily the way you want them to do it. And these people will be disruptive. I remember working at a bank once, and there was someone there — she was very good at her job, she was a program manager, she got [projects] in on time. But the destruction she kind of left behind her meant that people were leaving. I was always having to rehire for her. She was more disruptive than helpful.”

The matrix is also why Box 1 (high values, low capability) deserves a real second look. Manning’s reasoning: “people’s values are kind of instilled at quite a young age.” Capability you can train. Values, much less so. A high-values candidate who isn’t quite there on the skills can be a phenomenal hire if you have the bandwidth to develop them. If you don’t, put them in a talent pool and re-engage in 12 months.

For consistent matrix scoring across interviewers, the rubric needs to be the same for every panel member. A tool that builds explainable scorecards from the JD, like Recrudoc’s Instant Scorecards, gives the capability axis a consistent baseline. The values axis still has to come from human probing during the interview, but at least the capability side is no longer a guess.

Unconscious Bias: The Part Most “Cultural Fit” Frameworks Skip

In short: Without explicit bias training and process safeguards, “cultural fit” decays into “similarity bias” — hiring the same kind of person you already have. Manning makes unconscious bias training mandatory at King, builds it into interview training, and uses concrete process moves (defined behaviors, expected answer patterns, blind resume review) to push back on it.

Manning is direct: even the global director of diversity and inclusion at King admits she still has biases. “She says to me, ‘I still have biases. I’m from south London, I’ll always get on with someone from south London, but I need to remind myself not to do that.’ This is her job. She still recognizes that she has biases.”

The structural moves King uses to push back on bias in hiring:

• Mandatory unconscious bias training. Standalone module, required for everyone. Plus a refresher built into interview training so panelists who completed the original module a year ago don’t show up cold.
• Define values as observable behaviors. “If you have values, make sure you define the behaviors. Use those in interviews. Take them and write interview questions that relate back to those behaviors.” This stops “I don’t think they’re a culture fit” from being an unargueable veto. It forces the interviewer to point to specific behavioral evidence (or its absence).
• Pre-define the answers you’re hoping to hear. Before the interview: “what answers are you hoping for? Are you hoping for them to talk about this, this, and this?” Why this works: “when they review their feedback, they’re focusing more on the answers that they’ve got, not just ‘I’ve got three people and they’ve all had different answers and I’m going to then try and categorize them.’”
• Sanitize resumes where possible. King is trialing Hire First, a tool similar to Hired (“a bit like Tinder”). Candidate and company express mutual interest before names are shown. The resume itself is sanitized of name, interests, and country-specific formatting cues. This removes a lot of the surface-level signals that trigger similarity bias and stereotypes.
• Use System 2 thinking, not System 1. Manning references Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. “When you’re interviewing people, you want to be using your System 2 side more than your System 1.” System 1 is the lazy, pattern-matching mode that fires on a shared football team or a familiar accent. System 2 is the deliberate, evidence-based mode that asks for specifics.

The tactical translation:

• Before each interview, write down the answer pattern you’re hoping to hear. Compare actual answers against that pattern, not against each other or against your gut.
• Treat the interview like detective work. “Our jobs as interviewers is like a detective. If you think of the wash-up as being the court, you need to come up with evidence. The police don’t turn up to a court case without evidence.”
• Ban “fit” as an unjustified veto. Any “not a culture fit” judgment has to point to a specific behavior the candidate displayed (or failed to display) that misaligns with a written value.

Common Biases Manning Calls Out (and How to Counter Them)

In short: Confirmation bias, similarity bias, and stereotyping are the three biggest interview-stage failure modes. Each one has a specific countermove (predefined answer patterns, awareness training, explicit values criteria) that keeps cultural fit decisions from collapsing into “people like me.”

The biases Manning specifically names from his interview training:

Confirmation bias. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m not going to hire someone from Amazon because I’ve heard they’re not good,’ or ‘I’m going to hire someone from Facebook because I’ve heard they’ve got good people.’” The countermove: don’t grade the candidate against the brand on their resume. Grade them against the actual evidence they produce in the interview.

Similarity bias. Manning’s own example: a colleague (Adam Walker) wanted to do a podcast with him because “we’ll get on well, because we’re both bald and we’ve got beards.” Useful for friendships. Disastrous for hiring. The countermove: explicit awareness (“would I score this candidate the same if they didn’t share that surface trait with me?”) plus a structured rubric that forces evidence.

Stereotyping. Manning shows a photo of Snoop Dogg next to Martha Stewart and asks who looks like the convicted felon. (It’s Stewart.) The point: appearance-based stereotypes are wrong constantly, but they fire automatically. The countermove: design the interview around behaviors and values evidence, not impressions. The “draw a firefighter / pilot / surgeon” video Manning shows, where children draw all three jobs as men and then meet three women in those roles, is the same lesson at a higher reps count.

The general principle: the interview’s job is to surface evidence the panel can argue from at the wash-up. If your wash-up consists of “I liked her, I didn’t like him,” you’ve collected impressions, not evidence. The values × capability matrix only works when both axes are scored from concrete behavioral evidence.

What to Take Away From the King Framework

In short: Cultural fit hiring works when values are defined, behaviors are written down, every interviewer has a coverage area, evidence comes back to a structured wash-up, and bias is actively managed. It fails when “fit” means “feels right.” Most of this is process, not budget. Manning’s framing was specifically that this is low-cost.

The transferable pieces of the King framework most teams can adopt this quarter:

1. Define your values as observable behaviors, not adjectives. “Collaborative” is an adjective. “Brings other team members into a problem within the first day instead of disappearing into solo work for a week” is a behavior.
2. Brief your interview panel before each loop. Each interviewer gets a coverage area (specific values or specific capability). No two interviewers should be testing the same thing in different rooms.
3. Use a funnel-shaped questioning method. Spend most of the time defining the problem before getting to the action and result. Add a Learning question at the end as a values probe.
4. Run a structured wash-up. Plot every candidate on a values × capability 2x2. Discuss evidence instead of impressions. Avoid the high-capability/low-values quadrant.
5. Make unconscious bias training mandatory. Refresh it inside interview training. Pre-define expected answer patterns to give interviewers something to score against.
6. Where possible, sanitize the early stages. Blind resume review at the screening stage removes a lot of the surface bias that makes the rest of the process harder.

A recruiting CRM helps the parts of this framework that depend on consistency across many roles and interviewers: the structured rubric, the audit trail of who said what at the wash-up, the candidate record that shows behavioral evidence per value. Recrudoc’s Visual Pipeline tracks 42 actions across 7 stages, which is the substrate this kind of structured process needs to run on. Without that, you’re back to interview notes scattered across inboxes and Slack, and the wash-up becomes a memory game.

Want a CRM that supports values-and-capability hiring instead of just tracking it? Try Recrudoc free for JD Intelligence, structured scorecards, audit trail, and a Visual Pipeline that holds the whole loop together.

Sources

The insights in this article are based on the following industry expert discussion:

• “Hiring for Cultural Fit – What it Means & How to Do It Right” — Gary Manning, In-house Recruitment, YouTube