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Every organization, and every hiring manager, wants to know how to hire the best people. And every company wants to feel like it has an edge over its competitors. But let me ask you a personal question: Can you think back to a moment when someone in a decision-making position took a chance on you? Perhaps you were young and inexperienced, and maybe you didn’t have a flawless resume or a spotless track record, but they saw something worth investing in. You almost certainly rose to the occasion. You probably gave more to that person or organization than your experience or credentials alone would have suggested.
Why are so few leaders making that kind of bet today? And what are organizations losing as a result?
I have spent more than two decades studying how organizations recruit, promote, reward, and retain employees. In doing so, I have discovered that a company’s willingness to grant opportunity shapes employment interest and recruitment, job engagement, effort, and retention — far more than compensation or job design do. Opportunity can unlock human motivation and potential, which, I would argue, are among the most underpriced assets on your balance sheet.
Most leaders, however, reserve their biggest bets and opportunities for people they already perceive as “the best.” They want the candidate who has the most impressive credentials and checks every box on the job description. This instinct feels prudent, as if leaders are making a safe bet. In practice, it is one of the most expensive talent-management mistakes any organization can make.
Consider two problems with the instinct to hire or promote only the best. First, contrary to popular wisdom, nobody truly knows who the best talent is. My research shows that people rarely agree on what qualities or achievements matter for success in a given role. Two hiring managers in the same company, evaluating the same candidate, can reach wildly different conclusions about their fit, potential, and leadership qualities. Every company likes to believe it has a rigorous, objective talent-selection process. But in practice, decisions frequently rely more on subjective judgments and gut feelings. Many managers also default to conventional, easily defensible choices. After all, no one ever got fired for hiring the guy with a prestigious university credential.
The second problem is a market dynamic. The fixation on the very best pushes organizations into what I call an only the best mindset, which is the belief that a scarce, identifiable elite is out there and that success depends on finding them, hiring them, and paying them extraordinary salaries.
There have been dramatic examples of this recently, such as when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg led an aggressive drive to recruit top AI talent by offering compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years. But the «only the best» mindset produces a predictable set of outcomes: It often takes companies longer to fill positions, compensation bands become eye-watering, and talent pipelines narrow to the same small set of schools and employers.
This mindset also creates talent risks you may be underestimating. Star performers brought in from other organizations often perform worse once they move, as Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda, and Nitin Nohria famously highlighted. You might be paying a premium for a signal that fails to travel.
Another Way: Opportunity Mindset
There is an alternative to this chimerical pursuit of the best. I call it the opportunity mindset, and I want to be precise about what that means. It does not mean lowering the bar and settling for second-rate talent. It’s recognizing that identifying candidates who look great on paper is often entirely different from identifying those who would be good fits for the role. Recruiters and hiring managers who recognize this fact have a huge competitive advantage over those who do not.
Leaders with an opportunity mindset hire candidates who are good enough to succeed and then build the structural conditions — through excellent onboarding, mentorship, development, and evaluation processes — that help good people become great. These leaders evaluate potential by what a person actually does on the job, not by schools attended, past employers, or previous job titles.
In practice, here’s what the shift to an opportunity mindset looks like. Say your engineering team has an open entry-level role. The traditional process would typically narrow the pipeline down to candidates with a four-year computer science degree from a highly ranked university. A company with an opportunity mindset instead asks what key skills the job actually requires and then opens the candidate pool to include nontraditional applicants, such as community college graduates, career switchers, parents returning to work, or apprentices. Some applicants might not have a college degree, but if they can demonstrate the necessary skills, they are considered for the role.
Alternatively, imagine that a more senior person is needed. Rather than conducting an expensive external search, your organization posts the promotion opportunity internally and invites applications from anyone whose skills match the requirements. The role might not go to the employee whose face is most familiar to senior leadership but to the employee whose current work trajectory best predicts success.
Each of these choices is small. But, over time, they compound, deepening the talent pool and creating a more versatile and diverse workforce.
This tension between the «only the best» mindset and the opportunity mindset is at the heart of my book The Meritocracy Paradox. In it, I show how talent management systems that claim to reward top talent and hard work — the so-called meritocratic systems — can unintentionally reinforce bias and inefficiency. When hiring managers believe that their decisions are driven by purely objective metrics or that they operate in meritocratic organizations, they may fall prey to subconscious biases, such as perceiving the best as people who are demographically or culturally similar to themselves. In contrast, when organizations embrace an opportunity mindset, a key feature of truly meritocratic organizations, they shift from chasing after talent perfection to investing in potential.
Some organizations have already moved in this direction. For example, years ago, under now former CEO Ginni Rometty, IBM concluded that the traditional four-year-degree requirement was screening out capable workers and driving up the cost of talent without materially improving performance. IBM rebuilt its hiring practices to emphasize skills, launched apprenticeship programs to recruit from high schools and community colleges, and increased professional development opportunities for existing employees.
Bank of America implemented a skills-first approach and reported in 2022 that internal promotions accounted for nearly 45% of filled roles. This practice ensures that institutional knowledge stays put. Google, meanwhile, treats its own professional certificates as equivalent to four-year degrees for many entry-level roles. Both organizations have done the math and concluded that the only the best pipeline is too narrow, slow, and expensive to defend. Researchers have found similar gains at companies like Costco, Trader Joe’s, Mercadona (in Spain), and QuikTrip, where investment in employee skills development positively correlates with lower turnover, higher productivity, and stronger financial performance.
What About the Hiring Recession?
I anticipate an objection at this point, and it is a reasonable one. Early examples of skills-first hiring emerged from a different labor market era, in which workers were scarce and employers were desperate to widen the hiring funnel. The market has since changed. The white-collar job market has softened for job hunters, wage growth has slowed, and employees are holding on to their jobs instead of searching. College graduates, even those with desirable degrees from prestigious schools, are reporting lengthy and challenging job searches. In other words, we’re in the midst of a hiring recession, and the leverage has shifted to employers.
If you’re a hiring executive, you might think that you can now afford to be selective in a way you couldn’t have been just a few years ago. So why, you might reasonably ask, should you adopt an opportunity mindset now, when the case for holding out for the perfect resume has never been stronger?
I would respond that the case for an opportunity mindset has never been about scarcity. It has always been about return on investment. First, a hiring recession gives hiring managers more applicants, but not better judgment about which ones will succeed. If anything, a flood of AI-polished resumes makes credentialed signals noisier: Robert Half, for instance, reported that two-thirds of HR leaders now say that AI-generated applications are slowing their hiring, and a majority of hiring managers find AI-enhanced resumes harder to verify and trust. Grade inflation has added to the confusion, frustrating those employers that want to use GPA as a distinguishing factor for potential hires. When the paper trail can no longer be trusted, structured skills assessments and paid work trials become more valuable, not less.
Second, a soft hiring market is exactly when bets on unconventional candidates are cheapest. You are not bidding against 10 competitors for the same star employee; you are choosing from a deeper pool at lower cost. The capable career-switcher who would have been snapped up elsewhere in 2022 is now in your funnel.
Third, and most importantly, the current hiring recession will eventually come to an end. Demographic changes, such as an aging workforce and lower immigration, will shrink the labor force regardless of the current economic cycle. The organizations that can take a long-term approach, anticipate their future talent needs, and begin building that capacity from within, while they can, will benefit enormously when the market turns. Those that do not will have to find that capacity under pressure, at premium cost.
Let me close with a practical challenge for you and your organization. When making your next hiring decision, try one small experiment. Identify a small set of necessary (and specifically job-relevant) skills that predict success on the job. Evaluate every finalist using the same consistent assessment, giving everyone, from recent graduates to Generation Xers, the same shot. Then, once someone has been hired, commit to a specific development plan (if necessary) for their first year. Carefully track what happens to their performance, their retention, their growth, and the performance of the team around them. If the experiment fails, you have likely lost little. If it works, you will have found something your competitors are still paying a premium to chase: a way to turn good candidates into great employees.
This is the essence of the opportunity mindset: building a more resilient, more inclusive, and future-oriented organization. Remember the bet that someone once made on you. Recall how the returns compounded. The leaders who learn to make similar bets on others, systematically and thoughtfully, especially now, will be the ones who build the enduring organizations of the future.