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Scoping the role first
Hiring for the top 1 percent works the way a leadership search does, and it begins with scoping. Before talking to a single candidate, the team lists the skills and experiences it wants and stack ranks them. It also settles why the role is important and what success would look like.
That list sets up the sourcing strategy, the pitch to candidates, and the assessment, and it supplies the case for why this person and this role will have big impact. Most companies underinvest in this step, though leadership searches treat it as the cornerstone.
Why logos mislead
The criteria stay objective and transferable, which means they leave out which companies a candidate came from. A team at a certain company at a certain moment may have done fantastic things, and a logo on a resume can work as shorthand for that, but most companies jump to the logo almost immediately. Copying another company's definition of great also borrows a process that company may have gotten wrong, and every company has its own product and its own roles.
Why does a famous logo mislead hiring?
Psychologist Edward Thorndike reported the halo effect in 1920, after finding that military officers who rated soldiers high on one trait tended to rate them high on every other trait. One impressive detail colors judgment of everything near it. A well-known employer name on a resume works the same way, lifting impressions of skills it says nothing about. The effect has been replicated in studies of teachers, physicians, and job interviewers.
How do criteria set in advance reduce bias?
In a 2005 study in Psychological Science, Eric Uhlmann and Geoffrey Cohen asked participants to pick a police chief from a male and a female candidate. Participants who had not fixed their criteria beforehand redefined what mattered to favor whichever candidate was male. Participants who committed to the criteria first showed far less of this pattern. The study showed that agreeing on the yardstick before seeing candidates stops the yardstick from bending toward a favorite.
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