You can also access this resource and many others in Issue 361 of my Talent Edge Weekly newsletter.
One persistent challenge in hiring is the gap between how objective organizations believe their process is and how objective it actually is. A new article by Emilio J. Castilla, professor at MIT Sloan and author of The Meritocracy Paradox, examines this challenge. His research has found that the more confident a hiring team feels its process is fair and merit-based, the less vigilant it becomes about the bias that shapes who gets hired, which can result in hiring criteria that unintentionally exclude capable candidates from less traditional backgrounds. His alternative is what he calls an opportunity mindset: hire people who are good enough to succeed, then build the onboarding, mentorship, and development structures that help good people become great. He illustrates the shift with a simple example. Say an engineering team has an open entry-level role. The traditional approach narrows the pipeline to candidates with a four-year computer science degree from a highly ranked university. Under an opportunity mindset, the team instead asks what skills the role actually requires, then widens the pool to include community college graduates, career switchers, and parents returning to the workforce. As a bonus, I am resharing my post and infographic on eight segments of “hidden workers” and the red flags that may indicate your hiring process is overlooking them.
