Forbes Welcome

Article Headline: Six Reasons Why 'Less Qualified' Candidates Are Better For Your Company
(Apparently, this link stubbornly doesn't want to look pretty, so I'm including the headline.)

I find point #4 to be particularly interesting.

1. Other Candidates May Have Been Favored For Different Reasons: ". . . a direct comparison between two candidates overlooks the existence of other common biases that favor the privileged."

2. Removing Favoritism Is Not Enough To Fix Legacy Imbalances: ". . . it will take an extraordinarily long time to undo the existing imbalances that resulted from legacy biases. And, as long as these imbalances exist, your ability to attract and retain talent will be impaired."

3. Candidate Ranking Is Imperfect: ". . . selection processes are typically based on metrics that are often rooted in qualitative, subjective evaluations, and therefore cannot truly discriminate between two candidates that are not radically different from each other."

4. Optimizing Selection Does Not Guarantee Optimal Results: "In the field of optimization, algorithms that always choose the best solution at each step are called 'greedy,' and there are mathematical proofs that for most real-world problems, greedy algorithms yield sub-optimal solutions."

5. Direct Comparisons Ignore The Bigger Picture: ". . . candidate selection metrics typically focus on alignment with a specific role, but neglect to consider the bigger picture of how that person may contribute to the organization as a whole by balancing the qualities of other employees."

6. People Make Bad Judgments When Considering Individual Cases: ". . . research has revealed the existence of cognitive biases that lead experts to make bad decisions when they focus on individual cases, sometimes contradicting the decisions they make when they consider a broader context."