There is a manual for hiring across cultures. It’s only 3 questions long.

Hiring across cultures comes with questions you didn’t quite see coming. What’s expected of you. What’s expected of them. What you can joke about and what you can’t. Whose job it is to flag a problem, and when. Somewhere between signing the contract and the first call, you realise: nobody handed you the manual.

That missing manual is not a small thing. A year of quiet cultural friction can erode the whole business case for hiring across borders in the first place.

So the question surfaces, often quietly: what do I need to know about their culture to make this work?

What the standard answer offers

There’s a body of well-developed models in this sphere (Hofstede, Meyer’s Culture Map among the best known), country scores you can look up, and trainings you can book. None of it is wrong. Each model was built carefully and answers a real question: usually some version of how do these two cultures differ on this specific dimension.

That’s a useful question for some things. But it’s not very predictive of how the next 12 months of working with a specific person will go.

In 10 years of doing this work I’ve never run into a model or framework on this topic that stuck. That isn’t a verdict on the models. It’s a verdict on the question they answer, which sits a layer or two removed from the question that matters when an engagement is starting on Monday.

If you analyse what founders and CTOs actually talk about on X when they describe their distributed teams, it’s almost always about a specific operational incident, not about a dimension score.

What did stick is smaller than a framework. 3 questions, asked early. Together they take less than an hour, and over 10 years they’ve predicted more about how an engagement goes than any country score I’ve ever looked at.

Start with what success looks like for both sides

If you’re hiring across borders, surface what success looks like early, for the person doing the hiring and for the person being hired. What does success look like over the next 6 or 12 months for each of them? Where do those overlap, and where don’t they?

Most engagements skip this and go straight to scope. The cost of skipping shows up later, usually as misalignment that gets diagnosed as a culture clash but is really the absence of a shared frame.

Research shows that when two groups share a goal neither can reach alone, the salience of group difference drops. Shared goals don’t dissolve cultural difference. They make it operationally subordinate to something else.

A 15-minute conversation. One of the cheapest moves available, and one of the most consistently skipped.

Then ask where value differences actually create risk

Once shared success is named, value differences become assessable instead of abstract. The question shifts from do they share our values, which is unanswerable and operationally of limited use, to in this specific engagement, with this specific success definition, where do value differences create operational risk and where don’t they.

In practice, most differences turn out to be operationally inert. A new hire who personally holds different views about religion, family, or political life than the people doing the hiring is, in the context of shipping a feature on Friday or building a payments integration, almost always indistinguishable from someone who holds similar views. This isn’t optimism; it tracks the well-researched gap between what people say they think and how they actually behave in structured professional contexts.

A small subset of differences do matter, and they matter specifically. A team norm of openly disagreeing with the most senior person in the meeting requires a different setup with someone trained in a workplace where deference to seniority is the default. A culture of giving sharp, immediate written feedback requires a different setup with someone whose professional formation taught them to deliver criticism slowly and through indirection.

Most value differences are operationally inert. The few that aren’t tend to be specific, surfaceable, and manageable once you’ve named them. The work in this step is identifying which is which for this engagement, not for engagements in general.

Tell the new hire what they’re signing up for

This is the question that’s most often missing, and it’s the one that holds the other two together.

If part of what counts as success on the hiring side, even implicitly, is that the new hire will shift over time on something specific, the new hire has the right to know that going in. Not as confrontation. As transparency.

The “something specific” is almost never about personal beliefs. It’s about professional norms. A developer joining a team where the expectation is that you push back hard on the CTO’s design choices in the standup may have been trained in an environment where you raise concerns privately afterward, with seniority preserved. That’s a real shift to ask of someone, and it’s reasonable to ask it. It’s not reasonable to ask it without saying so.

Other examples are mundane. A team that operates fully async, in writing, with everything in English, can be a real adjustment for someone whose default working rhythm is verbal and synchronous. A hiring manager who wants problems flagged at the moment they appear, rather than when there’s a proposed solution alongside, is asking for a specific way of working, not a personality.

Naming this stuff up front does two things. It lets the new hire make an informed choice about whether the engagement is one they want; most do, and they’d rather know. And it removes the possibility of the engagement quietly drifting into bridging-by-assimilation, where the new hire absorbs the new norms without ever having been asked.

What this question does, quietly, is treat the new hire as a professional adult capable of deciding whether to take the engagement, which is what they are.

What this comes down to

These 3 questions aren’t much. Not a framework, not a training. They take less than an hour at the start of an engagement and they don’t ask you to walk on eggshells, defuse history, or solve anything bigger than the engagement itself.

What they do is small and specific. They surface what’s going to matter in this collaboration, before the misreads accumulate. What you get back from that, in my experience, is much more than a hire.