35 Influential Thought Leaders on Hiring for Values

Introduction

Most organisations say they hire for values. Almost none actually do. They write the values on a wall, list them in a job description, and then choose candidates based on the gut feeling of whoever happens to be in the interview room that day. What they are actually hiring for is familiarity, confidence, and likability, which have almost nothing to do with values and everything to do with the interviewer's own unconscious preferences.

This is the great paradox of values-based hiring: the organisations most likely to claim they practise it are often the most vulnerable to doing the opposite. Research published in the Academy of Management Journal found that hiring managers who relied on culture fit as a criterion consistently selected candidates who were similar to themselves in socioeconomic background, communication style, and social signalling. The values were incidental. The similarity was not.

The thought leaders on this list have spent their careers pulling this thread. They work in talent acquisition, organisational psychology, HR leadership, employer branding, DEI, and workforce strategy. What unites them is a serious, sustained engagement with a deceptively simple question: how do you build an organisation where the people you hire actually share the values you claim to hold?

The answers they have produced range from the deeply practical, including structured behavioural interview frameworks, scoring rubrics, and values-first job descriptions, to the philosophically challenging, such as what it means for values to be real rather than decorative, and whose values get centred in a supposedly shared culture. These are not comfortable conversations, and the best thinkers on this list do not make them comfortable. They make them productive.

Hiring for values is not about hiring people who agree with you. It is about building teams where people share a commitment to how work gets done, to honesty, to accountability, to how they treat each other when things go wrong. Done well, it is one of the most powerful tools for retention, culture health, and sustained performance. Done poorly, it is a sophisticated form of bias with a values story attached.

The 35 people on this list are helping organisations tell the difference.

If you want to explore how hiring for values, team dynamics, and leadership culture can work together in your organisation, Jonno White facilitates workshops and offsites that help leadership teams make those connections practical. Jonno is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, with over 10,000 copies sold globally. You can reach him at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Hiring for Values Matters

According to Gallup, only 21 per cent of employees globally are engaged at work. The cost of that disengagement runs to $8.9 trillion annually. A significant driver of this crisis is not poor management, inadequate pay, or lack of flexibility. It is values misalignment. When people join an organisation whose stated values do not reflect how it actually operates, the result is a particular kind of disillusionment that surveys consistently show as one of the top three drivers of voluntary turnover.

The Work Institute's 2024 Retention Report found that organisation culture and mission and values is among the primary reasons employees leave within the first year. When you hire someone who does not share your values, you are not just filling a role with the wrong person. You are beginning a relationship under false pretences that rarely ends well for either party.

Values-aligned organisations also outperform on objective measures. McKinsey's research on inclusion and diversity consistently finds that companies with genuinely embedded values around equity and belonging are between 36 and 39 per cent more likely to outperform financially than those that do not. The mechanism is not mysterious: when people believe in what they are building together, they work harder, collaborate more readily, and leave less often.

The thought leaders on this list are making the business case for values-based hiring not as a moral argument alone but as a performance argument. Their work shows that the organisations willing to do the harder, slower work of defining values clearly and assessing for them rigorously are building something that organisations who just hire for credentials cannot replicate.

Jonno White works with leadership teams to translate values into team culture and everyday behaviour. To discuss how that might work for your organisation, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

This list was compiled by assessing genuine, sustained contribution to the field of values-based hiring and talent strategy across four criteria. First, each person had to have produced original content, frameworks, research, or books that directly engage with how organisations hire for values, assess cultural alignment, or build values-driven recruitment processes. Second, we applied geographic and disciplinary diversity standards. The list draws from talent acquisition, organisational psychology, HR leadership, employer branding, DEI practice, and people analytics, spanning voices from North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, South Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. Third, we assessed whether each person's contribution had genuine impact, measured by adoption of their frameworks, citations by peers, or demonstrated influence on practice. Fourth, we prioritised people who are actively contributing to the conversation, not just those who published one landmark book a decade ago.

Category 1: The Architects

Every field has its framework builders: the people who stopped asking what should we do and started asking how do we make this repeatable. In values-based hiring, these are the thinkers who moved the conversation beyond intuition and into structured, assessable practice. Their work gives hiring managers and HR leaders the conceptual tools to go from we value integrity to actually measuring it in a candidate conversation. These five voices laid much of the intellectual groundwork that everyone else in this list is building on.

1. Lou Adler | Performance-Based Hiring Learning Systems (USA)

Few people have spent more time in the gap between what hiring managers say they want and what they actually measure than Lou Adler. As CEO of Performance-Based Hiring Learning Systems, Adler has spent over four decades helping organisations reframe what they are actually assessing in a hiring process, shifting the focus from credentials and surface-level culture fit toward performance outcomes and the behaviours that drive them. His approach directly addresses the failure mode of most values-based hiring: talking about values without defining the observable actions they require.

Adler is the author of the Amazon bestseller Hire With Your Head, now in its fourth edition, which has become a core text for thousands of recruiters and hiring managers worldwide. His Performance-based Hiring framework, which has trained more than 50,000 practitioners globally, provides a systematic way to translate values into role-specific performance expectations and then interview against them. His LinkedIn Influencer posts and LinkedIn Learning courses make him one of the most practically accessible voices in this space.

2. Hung Lee | Recruiting Brainfood (UK)

Few people have a clearer real-time view of where the talent acquisition profession is headed than Hung Lee, curator of Recruiting Brainfood, the weekly newsletter trusted by over 30,000 recruitment and HR professionals worldwide. Based in the UK and working globally, Lee has built one of the most engaged communities in the profession through his newsletter, Brainfood Live events, and relentless engagement with where the craft of recruiting is evolving. His perspective on hiring for values is grounded in the practical realities of what actually works in high-volume and specialist recruiting environments.

In his most discussed recent content, Lee has been exploring how AI is reshaping the foundational question of what organisations are actually hiring for when skills decay faster than careers, raising the argument that values and traits have always been what recruiters were selecting for, even when they labelled it skills-based hiring. That reframe is one of the most useful contributions to this conversation in recent years, and it has sparked significant debate among his community of practitioners.

3. Tim Sackett | HRU Technical Resources (USA)

Tim Sackett brings something rare to the values-based hiring conversation: decades of front-line experience as both a practitioner and a business leader, combined with an unflinching willingness to say what actually happens inside organisations rather than what should happen. As President of HRU Technical Resources and a prolific author and speaker, Sackett is one of the most widely cited voices in talent acquisition, having been named a Top Global HR and Recruitment Influencer by HR Executive in 2025.

His book The Talent Fix, Vol. 2 addresses the real-world obstacles that prevent organisations from hiring well, including the gap between stated values and the actual criteria that determine hiring decisions. Sackett's value to this list is his clarity about the difference between values-based hiring as an aspirational concept and the structural changes organisations need to make to their hiring processes if they want it to be real rather than decorative. His blog, The Tim Sackett Project, publishes fresh content daily for a dedicated practitioner audience.

4. Ben Eubanks | Lighthouse Research and Advisory (USA)

Ben Eubanks does something that too few voices in the talent acquisition space do: he measures things. As Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research and Advisory, Eubanks translates the philosophy of values-based hiring into data that organisations can act on. His research on candidate behaviour, employer brand credibility, and the gap between what employers think candidates value and what candidates actually value is some of the most practically useful work in the field right now.

His 2025 research highlighted the phenomenon of employer blanding, where organisations list identical core values and then wonder why they cannot differentiate themselves to candidates. Eubanks showed that authenticity in values communication correlates directly with candidate quality and acceptance rates. His books Talent Scarcity and Artificial Intelligence for HR extend this evidence-based lens across the full talent lifecycle, making him one of the most credible researcher-practitioners writing on how values fit into a comprehensive hiring strategy.

5. Dave Ulrich | University of Michigan / RBL Group (USA)

Dave Ulrich is sometimes called the father of modern HR, a title earned over four decades of research, writing, and practice that has fundamentally shaped how organisations think about the people function. His work at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and through RBL Group has produced more than 30 books on HR and leadership, and his concept of the HR Business Partner changed how organisations perceive the strategic role of people leaders. For this list, his relevance is specific: Ulrich has argued consistently that hiring is not primarily a transaction but a capability that, when done well, encodes organisational values into every team.

His framework on HR's role in building organisational capability provides the theoretical backbone for why values-based hiring is a strategic imperative rather than just an HR preference. Ulrich's sustained engagement with culture and capability in his LinkedIn content and speaking demonstrates a continued commitment to the questions at the heart of this list.

Category 2: The Culture Builders

Theory is one thing. Building a culture of 5,000 or 75,000 people where values are genuinely embedded in how people are hired, managed, and developed is something else entirely. The thinkers in this category have done both. They have practised values-based hiring inside organisations that required it to work at scale, and then made what they learned available to others. Their authority comes not from research alone but from the scar tissue of real implementation.

6. Laszlo Bock | Berkeley CHRO Leadership Academy (USA)

Laszlo Bock oversaw People Operations at Google from 2006 to 2016, growing the organisation from 6,000 to 75,000 employees while maintaining one of the most values-driven hiring cultures in the technology industry. His bestselling book Work Rules!, which has sold over 750,000 copies and donates all income to charity, remains one of the most comprehensive accounts of how a large organisation can systematise hiring for values, intellectual curiosity, and organisational fit without sacrificing diversity or rigour.

Bock founded Google's approach to structured, values-aligned hiring that included eliminating manager bias from final decisions, using committee review processes to ensure consistency, and defining qualities worth hiring for as measurable rather than intuitive. Now a Senior Advisor to AI firms and a co-director of the Berkeley Transformative CHRO Leadership Academy, Bock brings first-hand credibility that almost no one else in this space can match. His January 2026 post from Davos on the erosion of institutional trust demonstrates continued engagement with the forces shaping how organisations hire and lead.

7. Pat Wadors | UKG (USA)

Pat Wadors pioneered what may be the most influential conceptual contribution to values-based hiring in the past decade: the idea that belonging is the missing dimension in how organisations hire and build culture. As SVP of Global Talent at LinkedIn, Wadors coined the term DIBs, which stands for Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and demonstrated in a landmark Harvard Business Review article that values-based hiring which ignores belonging produces diverse teams that do not actually function as inclusive ones.

Now Chief People Officer at UKG, where she oversees the full employee experience for more than 14,000 staff, Wadors applies her frameworks in a global enterprise context. Her approach, that hiring for values requires hiring for a candidate's sense of psychological belonging and not just their stated beliefs, has been adopted by HR teams worldwide. Her speaking engagements at SHRM, LinkedIn's Talent Connect, and Forbes Power Women's Summit reach tens of thousands of practitioners annually.

8. Kelli Dragovich | HR Heretics (USA)

Kelli Dragovich has served as Chief People Officer at multiple high-growth technology companies, including Pendo, Looker, and Hired, as well as an interim CPO at Quizlet, while also holding HR leadership roles at GitHub, Yahoo!, and Intuit. This breadth of experience across pre-IPO and established technology environments gives her practitioner credibility that very few people in the CHRO conversation can match. She now runs her own advisory firm and co-hosts the HR Heretics podcast with Nolan Church.

Her core contribution to this space is the argument that values-based hiring breaks down at the manager level. Senior HR leaders can design the right process, but if managers are not trained and held accountable for using values-based assessment criteria, the system reverts to gut feel by default. Her LinkedIn content regularly challenges HR orthodoxy and invites genuine conversation from practitioners who have experienced the same frustrations, making her one of the most engaged voices in the field.

9. Claude Silver | VaynerX (USA)

Claude Silver serves as Chief Heart Officer at VaynerX, the world's first person to hold that title, and a role that makes explicit what most organisations leave implicit: that the emotional and relational quality of a workplace culture is a leadership responsibility, not a byproduct. Silver's philosophy of heart-led hiring, recruiting for empathy, curiosity, and character alongside technical competence, offers a counterpoint to the more framework-heavy approaches elsewhere on this list. Her contribution is a reminder that values-based hiring is also a human act, not merely a process.

Silver's background includes extensive work in coaching and leadership development before her move into the people space, and her approach to defining what good character looks like in an interview setting draws on that depth. Her book Be Yourself at Work and her LinkedIn content focus on vulnerability, accountability, and what it means for a leader to show up with genuine care for the people they hire and lead. With her as Chief Heart Officer, VaynerX has grown from 400 people to a global team of 2,000 across 11 countries.

10. S. Chris Edmonds | Purposeful Culture Group (USA)

S. Chris Edmonds has spent three decades studying the gap between values written on walls and values lived in teams, and his work provides one of the most useful frameworks for organisations trying to understand why their values-based hiring is not working. The answer, Edmonds consistently argues, is that most organisations treat values as nouns, such as integrity, excellence, and collaboration, when they need to be defined as verbs, as specific, observable behaviours that managers can assess, reward, and model.

His book The Culture Engine, an Amazon bestseller, provides a practical system for defining what values actually require people to do rather than just be, and his LinkedIn content applies this framework specifically to the hiring context. Without behavioural definitions, Edmonds argues, values-based hiring is just the interviewer's intuition with a philosophical costume on. His work has been adopted by organisations across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in building values-based performance frameworks that start with how people are recruited into the culture.

Category 3: The Equity and Belonging Voices

Values-based hiring has a shadow side, and the people in this category have made it their work to illuminate it. When companies hire for culture fit without clearly defining what that means, they frequently end up hiring for sameness, which produces homogeneous teams, suppresses innovation, and can entrench systemic bias. These thinkers do not oppose values-based hiring. They insist it be done honestly, with full awareness of who gets included and who gets screened out when values assessment is left to intuition rather than structure.

11. Torin Ellis | Torin Ellis Brand (USA)

Torin Ellis has been one of the clearest and most persistent voices in talent acquisition on the relationship between values-based hiring and racial equity. Based in the United States and working globally, Ellis argues that the stated values of most organisations are not neutral. They reflect the cultural norms, communication styles, and relational assumptions of whoever founded or currently leads the organisation, which statistically tends to mean they disadvantage Black candidates, candidates from working-class backgrounds, and candidates whose professional socialisation happened outside elite institutions.

Ellis regularly keynotes major HR events and maintains a vigorous LinkedIn and media presence focused on making diversity and inclusion in hiring genuinely substantive rather than performative. His specific contribution to this list is the argument that values-based hiring is only equitable when values are defined with input from the communities they claim to include. Without that, it is simply bias with a better story. He opened the Transform 2025 conference with a challenge to every practitioner in the room to move from passive agreement to active leadership.

12. Latesha Byrd | Perfeqta (USA)

Latesha Byrd leads Perfeqta, a talent performance and leadership consulting firm that partners with HR and executive teams across high-growth and enterprise companies. Her work is specifically relevant to the values-based hiring conversation because she works with both organisations and individuals navigating a hiring landscape that does not always operate as equitably as it claims to. She has worked with over 150 organisations including Amazon, HubSpot, and Zapier in building cultures that align people strategy with performance.

Byrd's LinkedIn content, where she is a recognised LinkedIn Top Voice on Company Culture, is among the most practically useful for HR leaders trying to understand what values-based hiring feels like from the candidate's side. Her advocacy for transparent values communication as a way to help candidates self-select authentically, rather than perform what they think the organisation wants, is one of the more genuinely original ideas in this space. It maps directly to the employer brand work done by others on this list and addresses the candidate experience gap that most frameworks ignore.

13. Minda Harts | The Memo LLC (USA)

Minda Harts is the bestselling author of The Memo, a career guide for women of colour in the workplace that became one of the most widely read books on what it actually feels like to navigate an organisation whose values are not experienced equitably across all employees. Now in its expanded reach through her second book Right Within and her most recent Talk to Me Nice, published in July 2025, Harts has built one of the most substantive bodies of work on the trust and belonging dimensions of workplace culture.

Harts works with organisations through The Memo LLC and as an NYU assistant professor to build inclusive cultures and hiring processes that do not just claim values but test whether they are actually experienced by the people most likely to face barriers. She has been named LinkedIn's number one Top Voice in the Workplace and one of Business Insider's Top 100 People Transforming Business. Her LinkedIn presence and keynote speaking reach HR leaders, people managers, and talent acquisition professionals grappling with the gap between DEI commitments and actual hiring outcomes.

14. Vivian Acquah | Amplify DEI (Netherlands)

Based in Amsterdam and working globally, Vivian Acquah brings a distinctly European and intersectional perspective to values-based hiring. As founder of Amplify DEI, she has built a practice focused on helping organisations understand that DEI is not a separate initiative from values. It is the test of whether stated values are real. Her consistent position is that an organisation claiming to value inclusion while its hiring processes consistently favour certain demographics is not a values-based organisation; it is a values-aspiring one, which is a very different thing.

Acquah's LinkedIn content is prolific and highly engaged, drawing an international audience of HR leaders, talent acquisition professionals, and organisational consultants who are working through the same questions in their own contexts. Her contribution to this list is the insistence that geographic and cultural diversity in how values are defined is not optional for global organisations. It is definitional to whether the values are actually shared or simply imposed. Her perspective on building equity into the design of hiring itself, not just its outcomes, represents some of the most forward-thinking work in this space.

15. Brigette Hyacinth | Leadership EQ (Trinidad/Global)

Brigette Hyacinth is one of the most widely read leadership and HR voices on LinkedIn globally, reaching an audience that spans North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Europe with content on leadership, HR practice, and what it means to build organisations where people can do their best work. As CEO and founder of Leadership EQ and an international keynote speaker, Hyacinth brings a global south perspective to questions of values that are often framed entirely from North American or Western European organisational contexts.

Her specific contribution to the values-based hiring conversation is the argument that emotional intelligence must be part of any values-based framework. Organisations claiming to value empathy, respect, or inclusion while hiring leaders with low EQ are simply not being honest about what their hiring process actually measures. Her book Transforming Leadership has reached readers in more than 20 countries, and her consistently engaged LinkedIn presence makes her one of the most amplified voices in the international HR community on these questions.

Category 4: The Practitioners

Values-based hiring is only as good as the people who implement it inside hiring processes. This category recognises the practitioners who have taken the frameworks, the research, and the philosophical arguments about values and translated them into actual interview protocols, employer branding strategies, candidate experience design, and TA team development. Their work happens at the intersection of theory and the Tuesday afternoon interview that a hiring manager is about to get wrong.

16. Katrina Collier | The Hiring Partner Perspective (UK)

Katrina Collier has built her entire career on the argument that recruitment is a human act, and that every piece of technology, process efficiency, or framework must be evaluated against whether it makes the candidate experience more or less human. As author of The Robot-Proof Recruiter, a Business Book Awards finalist now in its second edition, and host of The Hiring Partner Perspective (Unedited) podcast, Collier brings a facilitator's discipline to the question of how organisations can translate values into the actual candidate experience.

Her workshops with recruiting teams and hiring managers focus on the mechanics of values communication in job advertisements, the candidate journey, and interviewer preparation. Collier's argument that candidates can almost always detect the gap between a company's stated values and its actual culture during the hiring process, through how long they wait, whether interviewers show up prepared, and whether they are treated as a whole person or just a resume, is one of the most practically actionable contributions on this list. Her work spans five continents.

17. Lars Schmidt | Amplify Talent (USA)

Lars Schmidt founded Amplify Talent specifically to help HR professionals become more strategic, more modern, and more capable of building the kind of cultures that attract genuinely mission-aligned talent. As author of Redefining HR, one of the most comprehensive assessments of how the HR profession must evolve, Schmidt brings both the practitioner and the analyst lens to values-based hiring. His position is that HR leaders who want to hire for values must first be willing to redefine what HR means inside their organisations, moving from compliance and process administration toward genuine talent strategy.

Schmidt's LinkedIn content regularly challenges HR orthodoxy, and his Amplify Academy community has included CHROs from Spotify, Reddit, HubSpot, The LEGO Group, and many others, providing a peer learning environment for the people actually making values-based hiring decisions at scale. His argument that values-based hiring requires HR leaders to have the courage to push back on hiring managers who want to hire by gut feel is one of the more practically demanding on this list.

18. Meghan M. Biro | TalentCulture (USA)

Meghan M. Biro is the founder and CEO of TalentCulture, a content platform and community for HR and talent acquisition professionals, and the host of the WorkTrends Podcast, which has reached hundreds of thousands of HR professionals over more than a decade. Biro's contribution to values-based hiring is her work on the relationship between employer branding and values authenticity. Her consistent argument is that an employer brand is not a marketing document but a values contract between an organisation and its candidates.

Her Forbes contributions and podcast conversations consistently explore what makes employer brands credible versus performative, and her synthesis of research across talent acquisition, employee experience, and culture makes her one of the most useful connectors in the field. Biro brings particular value for organisations trying to figure out how to communicate their values authentically to candidates in a competitive talent market, rather than just claiming them. Her reach into the HR technology ecosystem also gives her unusual visibility into how tools either support or undermine genuine values communication.

19. Anna Ott | Talent Operations (Germany)

Anna Ott brings a rigorous, systems-thinking approach to talent operations that has made her one of the most cited voices in the European HR technology community. Based in Germany and working globally, Ott is known for producing consistently substantive original content on talent strategy, job architecture, and the structural conditions that allow values-based hiring to function reliably rather than randomly. In early 2026, her series on AI transformation in HR, specifically on how AI impacts competency frameworks, job architecture, and the skills-values interface, was highlighted by Recruiting Brainfood curator Hung Lee as some of the best thinking in the space.

Ott's relevance to this list is her insistence that values-based hiring requires organisational infrastructure: job architectures that define values-linked behaviours at each level, competency frameworks that make values assessment consistent across hiring managers, and HR technology that supports rather than undermines the human judgement required in values assessment. Her LinkedIn content consistently engages substantively with the practical obstacles to implementing values-based hiring at scale, and her voice represents one of the most important European perspectives on these questions.

20. Jan Tegze | Full Stack Recruiter (Czech Republic)

Jan Tegze is one of the most practically useful voices in talent acquisition globally, known for his commitment to making advanced sourcing and recruiting practices accessible to practitioners who lack the resources of enterprise HR departments. Based in the Czech Republic, Tegze brings a Central European perspective to hiring practices that are often discussed through an entirely North American or Western European lens. His book Full Stack Recruiter has become a standard resource for sourcing professionals worldwide.

Tegze's specific contribution to the values-based hiring conversation is his work on how sourcing strategies can be built to proactively find candidates who demonstrate values alignment through their public professional conduct, content, and community involvement, rather than relying entirely on the interview process to reveal it. His argument that a truly values-driven recruiter starts with a values-aligned sourcing strategy is one of the more original ideas on this list, and it has practical implications for any organisation trying to build a values-diverse pipeline before the first interview takes place.

21. Kevin Grossman | Survale (USA)

Kevin Grossman is VP of CandE Benchmark Research at Survale, where he continues to lead the Candidate Experience (CandE) Benchmark Research and Awards Program that he helped build from 2011 as the former President of Talent Board, the first nonprofit research organisation focused on improving candidate experience. Since Survale acquired the CandE program in 2025, Grossman has continued expanding the research, which has now surveyed nearly 1.9 million job seekers across more than 2,000 global employers.

His contribution to this list is specific and important: the CandE research consistently shows that candidates perceive values alignment, or its absence, through the quality of the hiring process itself, not just through what organisations say about their values. Grossman's data reveals that candidates who have a poor hiring experience consistently rate the organisation's actual values as misaligned with its stated values, regardless of how well-written the values statement is. This insight, that candidate experience is the primary medium through which candidates assess whether an organisation's values are real, is one of the most underappreciated findings in the talent acquisition field.

Category 5: The Researchers and Psychologists

Values-based hiring is not just a philosophical position. It is a claim about human behaviour, about whether values can be accurately assessed in a structured conversation, and about the predictive relationship between pre-hire values alignment and post-hire performance and retention. The researchers in this category have spent their careers producing the evidence base that makes values-based hiring credible rather than merely appealing. Their work provides the scientific foundation that practitioners need to push back on hiring managers who want to trust their gut.

22. Tasha Eurich | Tasha Eurich PhD (USA)

Tasha Eurich is an organisational psychologist whose research on self-awareness has some of the most direct implications for values-based hiring of any work in the field. Her book Insight, based on a decade of research into what actually makes people self-aware versus what they believe makes them self-aware, demonstrates that most people dramatically overestimate how clearly they understand their own values, motivations, and blind spots. For hiring practitioners, this has a direct and uncomfortable implication: candidates are not always the most reliable source of information about their own values.

Eurich's research suggests that values-based hiring processes need to go beyond what candidates say their values are and look for behavioural evidence, not because candidates are dishonest, but because self-knowledge is harder than most people assume. Her active LinkedIn presence brings this research directly to talent acquisition practitioners, HR leaders, and organisational consultants who are trying to build more accurate values assessment processes. Her TEDx talk on self-awareness has been viewed by millions globally.

23. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Columbia University (UK/USA)

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of business psychology at Columbia University and University College London, and one of the world's leading researchers on the science of talent, personality, and leadership assessment. His book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? addressed directly the failure modes of intuitive hiring, including the over-reliance on charisma, confidence, and familiarity as proxies for values and competence.

His research provides scientific rigour to the values-based hiring conversation, particularly on the question of structured versus unstructured interviews. Chamorro-Premuzic has consistently shown that unstructured interviews, where each interviewer asks different questions and assesses different things, have almost no predictive validity for job performance. Structured, values-based interviews with consistent criteria and scoring rubrics dramatically outperform them. His LinkedIn content regularly translates this research for practitioner audiences across multiple industries and geographies.

24. Neel Doshi | Vega Factor (USA)

Neel Doshi is the co-author, with Lindsay McGregor, of Primed to Perform, which introduced the Total Motivation (ToMo) framework to the business world. The framework identifies six factors that determine whether employees are motivated by intrinsic alignment with their work, which includes play, purpose, and potential, or by external pressure, which includes emotional pressure, inertia, and economic pressure. High ToMo organisations consistently outperform low ToMo organisations on every measurable dimension, and Doshi's research shows that hiring for intrinsic values alignment is the most reliable way to build a high-ToMo culture.

The practical implication for values-based hiring is specific: organisations should assess not just whether candidates share stated values but whether those values are intrinsically held rather than performatively expressed. Doshi's LinkedIn content and the Vega Factor platform apply the ToMo framework across talent acquisition, leadership development, and culture design, making him a consistently practical voice for HR practitioners seeking both the science and the implementation pathway for values alignment.

25. Enrique Rubio | Hacking HR (Colombia/USA)

Enrique Rubio is the founder of Hacking HR, a global community platform that brings together HR and people leaders to share knowledge, challenge conventional wisdom, and accelerate the evolution of the profession. Colombian-born and working globally, Rubio has built one of the most genuinely international communities in the HR space, with members from over 150 countries, which gives his perspective on values-based hiring a reach and diversity that most North American voices lack.

His specific contribution is the argument that values-based hiring in global organisations must account for cultural context. What accountability looks like as an observable behaviour in Colombia is not identical to what it looks like in South Korea or Norway, and assuming otherwise produces values assessment that is culturally biased even when it is methodologically structured. Rubio's community work and LinkedIn content are actively building the cross-cultural competency that global HR leaders need to implement values-based hiring honestly and equitably.

Category 6: The Employer Brand Voices

The best values-based hiring process in the world cannot fix a values communication problem that starts long before the first interview. Candidates form beliefs about an organisation's values from its job advertisements, its social media presence, its reviews on employer platforms, and its LinkedIn employer page, all before they speak to a single human being. The employer brand practitioners in this category are the people who shape that first impression, and their work is inseparable from a genuine values-based hiring strategy.

26. Charu Malhotra | BT Group (UK)

Charu Malhotra is one of the most respected employer brand practitioners in the United Kingdom, with a track record of building authentic values communication for organisations operating at scale. Based in London and working within BT Group, one of the UK's largest employers, Malhotra has experience of the specific challenges that come with translating values into employer brand content for a workforce that spans hundreds of roles, multiple geographies, and vastly different candidate personas.

Her LinkedIn content was highlighted in Recruiting Brainfood in March 2026 as among the most substantive employer branding thinking available. Her practical focus on the difference between values that are authentic expressions of organisational culture and values that are marketing language with no behavioural backing is directly applicable to anyone designing a values-based hiring strategy. Malhotra's work also engages with the measurement question, how do you know if your values communications are actually attracting candidates who share those values, which very few practitioners address with the rigour she brings.

27. Perry Timms | PTHR (UK)

Perry Timms is one of the most consistently provocative and practically useful voices in the United Kingdom's HR community, and a TEDx speaker on the future of work. As founder of PTHR (People and Transformational HR), he has spent over a decade pushing organisations to think differently about how they attract, recruit, and develop people, including the insistence that values-based hiring is only meaningful if it is part of a broader commitment to values-based management, performance, and development. You cannot hire for values and then manage people as if the values do not matter.

Timms' Transformational HR approach, which draws on systems thinking, positive psychology, and organisational development, provides a framework for organisations trying to ensure their hiring for values connects to everything downstream. His LinkedIn and conference presence makes him one of the most connected voices between the TA community and the broader organisational development world, bridging a gap that often prevents values-based hiring from having the sustained impact it should. His Thinkers360 recognition as a top HR thinker reflects the breadth of his contribution.

28. Laurie Ruettimann | Punk Rock HR (USA)

Laurie Ruettimann is one of the most distinctive voices in HR, a former practitioner turned author, speaker, and podcast host who has spent years arguing that the HR profession needs to stop performing wellness and start delivering it, stop claiming values and start living them. Her podcast Punk Rock HR is one of the most honest conversations happening about what actually goes wrong inside organisations, including the specific failure modes of values-based hiring when it becomes performative rather than substantive.

Her book Betting on You is aimed primarily at individuals navigating broken organisational cultures, which makes it essential reading for anyone designing values-based hiring processes, because it demonstrates exactly what candidates experience when an organisation's stated values diverge from its actual culture. Ruettimann's direct, zero-tolerance-for-corporate-jargon communication style makes her one of the most trusted voices for practitioners who are tired of theoretical frameworks that ignore the messiness of real organisations.

29. Mervyn Dinnen | TLO Research (UK)

Mervyn Dinnen is a UK-based HR analyst and researcher whose work through TLO Research and as a conference speaker focuses on the practical intersection of talent acquisition trends, HR technology, and workforce strategy. His perspective on values-based hiring is grounded in the evidence: what do the data on candidate behaviour, retention, and engagement actually tell us about the relationship between values alignment in hiring and outcomes?

Dinnen's research and commentary are particularly useful for HR leaders who need to make the business case for investing in values-based hiring processes. His work on the candidate experience side of values assessment, and how technology can either support or undermine genuine values assessment in hiring, makes him one of the more practically useful analytical voices on this list. His regular conference contributions and LinkedIn content serve a practitioner audience seeking substance over aspiration.

30. Toby Culshaw | Amazon (UK)

Toby Culshaw leads talent intelligence for Amazon, one of the most complex and analytically sophisticated hiring operations in the world. His contribution to the values-based hiring conversation comes from a specific angle: what does talent intelligence, the discipline of using data about labour markets, competitor hiring, and workforce composition to inform talent strategy, tell us about where and how to find candidates whose values align with organisational culture?

Culshaw's work and LinkedIn content explore the relationship between data-driven talent sourcing and the human judgement required to assess values alignment, arguing that the best approach combines both rather than treating them as alternatives. His regular contributions to Recruiting Brainfood and the broader talent intelligence community provide practical insights from one of the world's largest and most systematic hiring operations, making his perspective uniquely valuable for TA leaders trying to scale values alignment beyond a single team or function.

Category 7: The Culture and Belonging Architects

Values-based hiring does not happen in a vacuum. It requires an organisational culture where values are actually lived, where leaders model them, where performance management reinforces them, and where belonging is real enough that new hires can bring their authentic selves to work rather than performing what they think the organisation wants. The thinkers in this final category work at the intersection of hiring and culture: they understand that who you hire determines what culture you build, and what culture you build determines who will flourish in it.

31. Hebba Youssef | Workweek / I Hate It Here (USA)

Hebba Youssef is the Chief People Officer at Workweek and founder of I Hate It Here, a newsletter and podcast that has built an audience of HR professionals who want honest conversations about what is actually broken in workplace culture and HR practice. Her willingness to name the gap between what organisations claim about their values and what employees actually experience makes her one of the most trusted voices for practitioners who are tired of the performative version of values-based hiring.

Youssef's specific contribution to this list is her work on the relationship between values-based hiring and psychological safety. She argues that hiring people who share an organisation's values is meaningless if those people do not feel safe enough to actually express those values at work. If they feel they have to hide disagreement, suppress authentic reactions, or perform a version of the culture rather than inhabit it, then values-based hiring has produced a more sophisticated form of the same problem it was meant to solve. Her LinkedIn content draws consistently high engagement from HR practitioners across the United States and internationally.

32. Whitney Johnson | Disruption Advisors (USA)

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors and one of the most original thinkers on the relationship between individual growth and organisational development. Her S-Curve of Learning framework, which shows how people move from novice to mastery and back again through deliberate disruption, has direct implications for values-based hiring: the candidates most likely to sustain values alignment over time are those with a strong capacity for learning, not those with the most polished experience.

Johnson's argument is that organisations hiring primarily for established expertise are selecting for people who are at the top of their current learning curve and who may have the least appetite for the growth and disruption that a genuinely values-driven culture requires. Her LinkedIn content and her book Smart Growth engage with this dynamic for both individual contributors and HR leaders, making her one of the more unexpected but genuinely useful voices on this list. Her approach connects hiring strategy to learning culture in ways that most frameworks miss.

33. John Amaechi OBE | APS Intelligence Ltd (UK)

Professor John Amaechi OBE is one of the most intellectually rigorous voices in the organisational psychology space, bringing a background as both a professional athlete and a trained psychologist to questions of culture, belonging, and performance. As founder of APS Intelligence Ltd and Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter Business School, he works with some of the world's largest organisations on leadership development and organisational culture. His specific contribution to the values-based hiring conversation is the insistence that values must be tested under stress, not just declared.

Amaechi has argued in public lectures and LinkedIn content that values-based hiring processes which only assess candidates in comfortable, performance-optimised interview conditions will consistently fail to select for the values that actually matter: those that hold when people are under pressure, when they face disagreement, or when doing the right thing is inconvenient. His most recent book It's Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, released in September 2025, applies this thinking to everyday leadership practice. Named a LinkedIn Top Voice in 2020 and inducted into HR Magazine's Hall of Fame in 2022, he is among the most credentialled voices on this list.

34. Leandro Herrero | Viral Change (Spain)

Leandro Herrero is the founder of Viral Change, a consultancy based in Spain that specialises in making cultural transformation happen through small, targeted behavioural changes rather than large, planned programmes. His contribution to the values-based hiring conversation is one of the most original on this list: the argument that organisations cannot hire their way to a values-driven culture if the culture is not already creating the conditions for those values to be expressed.

Herrero's systems thinking approach shows that values-based hiring must be embedded in a broader cultural change architecture, and that organisations which try to fix a broken culture purely through hiring decisions are attacking a symptom rather than a cause. His books, including Viral Change and The Flipping Point, and his LinkedIn content provide a theoretical and practical framework that HR leaders and organisational development practitioners find genuinely useful precisely because it challenges the assumption that better hiring alone can transform culture. His voice represents the European systems perspective that is too often absent from these conversations.

35. Bhushan Sethi | PwC (India/Global)

Bhushan Sethi is a global people and workforce strategy leader at PwC, with specific expertise in the intersection of ESG, values-aligned leadership, and talent strategy across emerging markets and global organisations. His contribution to this list is a global south perspective: the argument that values-based hiring frameworks developed primarily in North American or Western European organisational contexts carry implicit assumptions about what values look like, how they are expressed, and what structures support them, assumptions that do not translate universally.

Sethi's work addresses the specific challenge faced by multinational organisations trying to implement consistent values-based hiring frameworks across markets with very different cultural and regulatory contexts. His PwC research on workforce strategy in Asia and emerging markets provides some of the most rigorous analysis available on how values-based hiring can be adapted to work across diverse global contexts, rather than simply exported wholesale from headquarters. His perspective is essential for any organisation claiming its values are truly global.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several people were seriously considered for this list but did not make the final 35. Simon Sinek's work on Start With Why is foundational to values-based hiring philosophy, but the vast majority of his current content focuses on purpose at the individual level rather than values assessment in hiring specifically. Adam Grant's organisational psychology research is essential reading for anyone in this space, and his frameworks on how people contribute at work have direct application to values assessment, but his current content output has broadened significantly beyond talent acquisition. Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety is arguably the most important research in the adjacent space, though her engagement with the hiring-specific context is more limited than others on the list. Josh Bersin covers values-based hiring regularly in his analysis and produces some of the best HR analytics research available, but the current focus has shifted significantly toward AI transformation. All four are worth following closely alongside the 35 on this list.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The most common mistake in values-based hiring is confusing our kind of person with a person who shares our values. The first is a bias. The second is a legitimate hiring criterion. The distinction sounds simple but is remarkably difficult to operationalise, particularly when hiring managers are given discretion to assess culture fit without specific behavioural definitions. Every organisation doing this incorrectly thinks they are doing the right thing, because the experience of interviewing someone who seems like a good fit feels exactly the same whether that sense is grounded in genuine values alignment or implicit affinity bias.

A closely related mistake is treating values assessment as something that happens in the interview rather than something that is built into the entire hiring process. An organisation that claims to value transparency but takes three weeks to give candidates interview feedback is communicating something louder than anything asked in a behavioural interview. An organisation that values respect but has hiring managers show up to interviews unprepared is signalling that respect applies to some people and not others. Candidates notice this, and the CandE research from Talent Board and Survale consistently shows that candidate experience perceptions of values alignment are shaped far more by how they are treated during the process than by what they are told during it.

Another persistent mistake is using the same interview questions for values assessment as for skills assessment, without any separate scoring criteria. Values-based questions need their own rubric, and that rubric needs to have been created collaboratively, ideally with input from people at different levels of the organisation, not just senior leadership whose experience of the values may not reflect the average employee's reality.

Organisations also frequently make the mistake of defining their values from the top down without involving people who are not in positions of power. When leaders define what we value in a room full of people who are already very successful within the current culture, they are defining the values that helped them succeed, which may or may not be the values that help everyone succeed. The result is a set of values-based hiring criteria that systematically advantage people who are similar to current leaders, which is precisely the problem values-based hiring is supposed to solve.

Finally, organisations underestimate the role of hiring manager training. The best values-based hiring process in the world will be undermined by a single untrained hiring manager who trusts their gut over the structured framework. Values-based hiring requires organisational commitment, not just a good process document.

Implementation Guide: Taking Action

The first step in building a genuine values-based hiring process is doing the work that most organisations skip: defining what your values actually require people to do. If one of your values is accountability, write down what accountability looks like as a behaviour in three specific work scenarios, when a project fails, when a colleague makes a mistake, and when a leader makes a decision the employee disagrees with. If you cannot do this for each of your stated values, your values are not yet defined well enough to hire against.

Once you have behavioural definitions, the next step is building structured interview questions that reveal whether a candidate has actually demonstrated those behaviours. These are not questions about what a candidate would do in a hypothetical scenario. They are questions about what the candidate has specifically done in real situations, with follow-up questions that test the specificity and consistency of their answers. Tell me about a time when you were asked to do something you believed was wrong, and what you did is a stronger values-based question than how would you handle ethical disagreement in the workplace. The first requires evidence. The second invites performance.

The third step is designing a scoring rubric that all interviewers use consistently. Without a rubric, values assessment reverts to whoever in the room is most persuasive, which is rarely the person with the most accurate sense of whether a candidate's values actually align. The rubric does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be specific enough that two interviewers watching the same interview would give the same score for the same response.

Building in a debrief process where interviewers share their scores before discussing their impressions is one of the most effective ways to prevent anchoring bias from undermining the process. When the most senior person in the room shares their impression first, everyone else adjusts their assessment to match. The structured debrief prevents this and produces more honest, more accurate assessments.

Finally, measure your outcomes. Track whether candidates hired through your values-based process have higher retention at 12 months, higher performance review scores, and higher manager satisfaction ratings than candidates hired through less structured processes. If the data does not show a difference, revisit your values definitions or your assessment criteria. Values-based hiring, done right, should have a measurable effect on business outcomes, and measuring it is the only way to know if you are doing it right.

Jonno White facilitates team sessions that help leadership teams articulate their values in behavioural terms and build the team culture that makes those values real in day-to-day work. He is the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, with over 10,000 copies sold globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how he can support your organisation. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is values-based hiring?

Values-based hiring is a recruitment approach that assesses candidates not just for their skills, qualifications, and experience but for whether their personal values align with the organisation's core values. In practice, it involves defining what values look like as observable behaviours, building those definitions into interview questions and scoring rubrics, and assessing candidates consistently against those criteria rather than relying on intuitive culture-fit judgements.

How do you assess values in an interview?

The most effective method is structured behavioural interviewing: asking candidates to describe specific situations where they demonstrated the values the organisation cares about, rather than asking what they would do in a hypothetical scenario. Paired with a consistent scoring rubric reviewed by multiple interviewers, this approach produces far more reliable and equitable assessments than unstructured interviews or gut-feel culture-fit assessments.

What is the difference between culture fit and values fit?

Culture fit typically refers to whether a candidate feels comfortable in the existing culture, which often translates to whether they remind interviewers of people already there. Values fit asks something more specific and more equitable: does this person's approach to honesty, accountability, collaboration, or other defined values align with how we say we want to operate? Values fit can accommodate people who are very different in personality, background, and communication style, while culture fit often cannot.

How was this list compiled?

This list was compiled by assessing sustained, original contribution to the field of values-based hiring and talent strategy. Criteria included geographic and disciplinary diversity, the quality and specificity of each person's contribution to this particular conversation, and whether each person is actively contributing to the field right now rather than resting on past work. The list includes practitioners, researchers, HR leaders, talent acquisition specialists, DEI advocates, and employer brand strategists to reflect the full range of expertise required to implement values-based hiring effectively.

Can I hire someone to run a values-based hiring workshop or team culture session for my organisation?

Yes. Jonno White, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries and founder of The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders, facilitates leadership workshops that help organisations translate their values into team behaviour, communication practices, and hiring strategy. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what would work for your team.

What are the business outcomes of hiring for values?

Research from McKinsey, Gallup, and the Work Institute consistently shows that values alignment is one of the strongest predictors of retention, engagement, and team performance. Companies with genuinely embedded values-driven cultures outperform peers financially by up to 39 per cent, and employees who feel aligned with organisational values leave at significantly lower rates than those who do not. The CandE Benchmark Research also shows a direct correlation between values communication quality in the hiring process and long-term candidate relationship outcomes.

Final Thoughts

The thought leaders on this list have collectively spent thousands of hours working on a question that most organisations treat as either solved or impossible: how do you actually know whether a candidate shares your values?

The honest answer is that you never know for certain. Values are revealed over time, under pressure, and in circumstances that a hiring process can only partially simulate. What you can do, with structured processes, clear definitions, consistent assessment, and genuine organisational commitment, is dramatically improve the probability that the people you hire will build the culture you are trying to build rather than undermine it.

The thinkers on this list have made that work tractable. They have built the frameworks, done the research, challenged the assumptions, and asked the uncomfortable questions that a field comfortable with gut-feel hiring needed someone to ask. Following them is not just professional development. It is the beginning of thinking more seriously about one of the highest-leverage decisions any organisation makes: who it lets through the door.

If you are ready to go beyond reading about values-based hiring and start implementing it in your organisation through workshops, team development sessions, or executive offsites that translate values into daily practice, Jonno White works with organisations around the world to make that happen. Jonno is the bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, available at amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD, and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator who helps leadership teams work more effectively together. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. Many of Jonno's most impactful sessions have been with teams who brought him in for two days and are still using the tools two years later. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start a conversation.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

For more on building high-performing leadership teams and the frameworks that make values real in day-to-day work, check out the blog post '30 Effective Tips: Working Genius for Executive Teams' at consultclarity.org/post/working-genius-executive-teams.

That post covers how the Working Genius framework helps executive teams understand their natural strengths, reduce friction, and make better decisions about how work gets done. If you are thinking about values-based hiring, the question of what kind of team you are building and what working style it requires is the natural next question. The Working Genius model provides one of the most practical answers available.

Keep reading: consultclarity.org/post/working-genius-executive-teams