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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 discre
