The Elusiveness of Merit-Based Hiring

Since early 2025, organizations seeking to curry favor with the current U.S. administration have disavowed earlier commitments to workforce diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and proclaimed that their hiring practices are therefore meritocratic. But framing DEI and merit as antithetical dichotomies, as various executive orders have done, does not mean that abandoning the former results in the latter.

Good DEI practice is designed to broaden the pool from which companies seek to recruit top talent rather than, say, limit their searches to members of reliable old boy networks. Good DEI practice does not replace hiring criteria like demonstrated talent and achievement with demographic criteria. And supposedly meritocratic hiring, in practice, does little to ensure that individuals are selected based on their likelihood of success on the job. Indeed, unbeknownst to many proponents of meritocracy, merit-based practices can be both elusive and illusory.

Merit is a compelling principle. However, many so-called meritocratic practices are fraught with error, even if done with the best intentions. Meritocrats often advocate for practices that they genuinely believe are merit-based but are not — what I call the merit mirage. They may also disparage practices that they believe are not meritorious but are (that is, they demonstrate merit skepticism). Understanding where many attempts at meritocracy go wrong will help leaders better navigate the alleged conflict between DEI and merit.

What Validity Means in Hiring, and Why It Matters

What laypeople call “merit” is referred to as validity by industrial-organizational psychologists who are experts in the technical science behind employment selection. Validity means that the selection practice is job-related: It cannot be assumed; it must be demonstrated according to accepted validation methods. A truly valid hiring process can select higher-performing employees. In contrast, face validity refers to hiring practices that appear valid (or job-related) to the layperson but provide little direct benefit to the organization beyond the appearance of fairness.

Some assessments that lack empirical proof of their validity have face validity and might be passionately supported by individuals who believe in merit due to the merit mirage. Many managers who are too busy to properly vet these types of measures fall prey to the use of such assessments. In addition, applicants who perform well on assessments that have little predictive value truly see the outcome as evidence of their merit, even though such measures are not valid. These types of assessments often advantage majority groups.

Other examples of the merit mirage include the following practices:

• Using educational requirements that are assumed, but have not proved, to predict job performance.
• Relying on “years of experience” requirements but failing to recognize that quantity is not the same as quality, or that after a certain number of years, there are typically significant diminishing returns on years of experience.
• Assessing qualities that are not job-related or are relatively unimportant. Common examples include overvaluing first impressions, nonverbal communication skills, and professional dress. Polished interview skills often do not translate to strong job performance.
• Confusing rigor for relevance. A challenging assessment process is no substitute for one that is more relevant and more comprehensive. Holistic assessment is often more effective than arduous assessment.
• Evaluating group characteristics instead of individual characteristics, such as identity-based stereotypes (including positive ones), or selecting based on the reputations of previous employers or educational institutions attended. Individual merit must be based on individual qualities.
• Using subjective assessments of motives or level of motivation. This is easy to fake; further, motivation to get a job is often incorrectly assumed to predict motivation to perform a job.
• Assuming that a selection practice that is frequently used by others or has shown to be valid for other jobs or organizations is valid for the job you are using it for.
• Incorrect assumptions about what is being measured. A common example is the use of credit checks. One typical belief is that people who have good credit are responsible and those who have bad credit are irresponsible or are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. There is no empirical justification for either assumption. Valid measures of conscientiousness and integrity would better assess responsibility and ethics, respectively, and would be more meritorious compared with credit checks.

The Merit Mirage in Practice

To achieve true merit-based hiring, it is important to use assessments that have proved to be valid/job-related, standardized, and reliable. However, this requires a level of human resource management expertise that most hiring managers do not possess; in fact, even many HR professionals err.

For example, a large organization developed and validated a rigorous and thorough exam for entry-level selection. However, when it started using the exam for making selection decisions, it did so in a manner that differed from how the exam was used in the validation study; the assumption was that it would make no difference because the exam itself had not been modified. After using the exam for 12 years, the organization finally investigated its validity as used and found that it was not valid, because the correlation with job success was not statistically significant. It had wasted more than $17 million administering this rigorous but invalid exam to thousands of applicants. The organization (and thousands of selected applicants) thought selections were based on merit, but they were essentially random — it was a merit mirage.

Perhaps the biggest cause of the merit mirage is a stubborn reliance on intuition and subjectivity, and the incessant use of haphazard selection procedures. For more than four decades, there have been significant advancements in developing selection procedures that can achieve both merit and diversity. Yet these tools are not widely used. One reason is lack of awareness of the tools or how to properly use them. However, another reason is that many recruiters and hiring managers prefer to rely on their own discretion and intuition. They rely on the myth of selection expertise, believing that their knack for identifying merit is more effective than standardized assessments, despite widely available research to the contrary. For example, many interviewers (whether managers or HR professionals) understand that unstructured interviews are ineffective and that structured interviews (which are more valid, reliable, standardized, legally defensible, and less prone to bias) are far more effective. Yet, paradoxically, they are relieved to know that semi-structured interviews (which are moderately effective and allow for some discretion) are another option, and they are strongly inclined to use this option even though it is less effective compared with structured interviews.

The Roots of Merit Skepticism

Other selection methods may be shown, through scientific empirical studies, to possess validity and yet may lack face validity and thus appear invalid to the layperson. It can be difficult to convince managers to adopt these types of measures or to communicate their value to applicants who perform poorly on them. These measures help organizations hire the most qualified applicants, even if such approaches may be opaque and even upsetting to applicants, or viewed with skepticism by managers. These types of assessments typically lessen the majority group’s advantage (which can be misinterpreted as favoring the minority group) and often result in demographic parity.

Merit skepticism often seeks to dismiss personality assessments and biographical questionnaires that surface candidates’ life experiences — but some organizations instead choose to embrace them. For example, a large global company that is very successful, has a strong culture, and is ranked highly on several “best places to work” lists, relies, in part, on personality, values, and strengths assessments in its entry-level selection process. Applicants who are not hired frequently groan about the long selection process and complain about the portions of it that they perceive to be irrelevant or unrelated to the job or to pertinent experience and education. Even though the selection process lacks face validity to applicants, it is valid and instrumental to the organization’s effectiveness. It is consistent with merit principles, even if applicants do not perceive it to be.

Many HR professionals and corporations recognize the value of personality and biographical measures for employment selection because such measures have a long history and robust empirical support. However, the U.S. government has had challenges embracing them. In 2014, the Federal Aviation Administration began using a biographical questionnaire for air traffic controller hiring, but that led to a class-action lawsuit. The validity of the measure is yet to be determined because the case is still pending, but it is notable that most of the critics of the biographical questionnaire attacked it based on its lack of face validity (because laypeople could not see a rational relationship between the items and job performance) rather than its validity (or lack thereof).

More recently, in September 2025, the U.S. Army ended its use of the Command Assessment Program. This was a rigorous, holistic approach to making promotion decisions and included a variety of assessments, including psychological measures. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth terminated the program, calling it a failed “woke” experiment. He declared that promotions will now be based only on merit and performance, and the Army reverted to the Centralized Selection List process for making such decisions. That process was first adopted in 1975 and consists of a review of personnel files that lasts only a matter of minutes. In sum, merit skepticism can result in lawsuits and less meritorious solutions.

It’s critical for leaders to promote the use of proper validation methods so that their organization’s candidate selection practices yield genuine merit rather than the merit mirage. Such a rigorous approach may give companies a stronger position to defend against charges of discrimination than flawed merit or diversity initiatives. It requires investment in developing greater HR management expertise so that, for example, assessments can be thoroughly vetted for validity. Perhaps, more importantly, managers need to possess (1) the humility to recognize that their discretion is likely flawed, (2) the openness to use alternative methods, and (3) the wisdom to rely on empirically supported practices.

Many of the selection methods that achieve true merit (such as valid structured interviews, reviews of work samples and biographical data, and some assessments of integrity, and some personality traits) also yield diversity. Thus, it is possible to both maintain DEI commitments and hire based on merit: What some present as two opposite goals can in fact coexist.