Hiring Great People is Not an Accident—It’s a Process. Here’s How to Get It Right

For years, companies have treated hiring as a mix of gut feeling, resume reviews, and outdated selection methods. Hiring managers claim they “know the right person when they see them.” Recruiters chase CVs that match arbitrary experience requirements. And leadership assumes that as long as they fill positions, hiring is working.

But let’s be honest: most companies are NOT hiring the best people—they are hiring the most familiar people.

The truth is, great hiring is not an accident. It is the result of a structured, disciplined, and repeatable process. And that process is called Merit-Based Hiring.

The Only Way to Achieve Fair & High-Quality Hiring

I’ve said it before, and will say it again: Merit-based hiring is the only way to ensure you are actually selecting the best talent.

🎯 It is NOT about diversity quotas.

🎯 It is NOT about hiring people based on identity.

🎯 It is NOT about gut feeling or “culture fit.”

Merit-based hiring is about one thing only: Selecting candidates based on their ability to succeed in the role—measured objectively, consistently, and free from bias.

🌍 Diversity is the outcome of great hiring, not the goal. If you select based on actual ability, you will naturally create diverse teams—because great talent comes from all backgrounds.

The problem? Most hiring processes are NOT merit-based.

Companies still rely on experience-based hiring—which selects based on:

❌ Years of experience (instead of actual capability)

❌ Previous job titles (assuming past roles predict future success)

❌ Big-name companies (as if branding equals ability)

❌ Education & university prestige (which has no correlation to job performance)

None of these have predictive value. Yet they dominate most hiring decisions. This is where Talent Acquisition (TA) needs to step up.

TA Leaders: Stop Complaining. Start Leading.

It’s not enough for TA teams to understand what good hiring looks like. It is our responsibility to teach the business how to hire the right way.

Too often, TA professionals complain that hiring managers:

👉 Use gut feeling over structured assessments

👉 Refuse to follow a standardized process

👉 Default to hiring people who “fit in”

But here’s the truth: If hiring managers don’t know how to hire, that’s on us.

💡 We must lead the change—not wait for permission. It is TA’s duty to establish structured, data-driven hiring practices that force businesses to make better, more defensible hiring decisions. And that starts with knowing exactly what we are selecting for.

How to Implement Merit-Based Hiring (Step by Step)

1️⃣ The Job Intake: Setting the Foundation for Merit-Based Hiring

💡 A great hiring process starts with a great job intake.

First Define What Success Looks Like Before You Start Hiring. The job intake meeting is the single most important conversation between the Hiring Manager, Talent Advisor, and HRBP.

Kicking in the obviously open door, but..; You cannot select the right talent if you don’t know what success in the role looks like.

Instead of hiring based on past experience, merit-based hiring selects based on:

✔ Skills & Competencies – The measurable abilities required for success in the role.

✔ Accomplishments & Behaviors – Evidence that the candidate has delivered results in the past.

✔ Problem-Solving & Adaptability – The ability to handle challenges, learn quickly, and grow.

If you haven’t defined these success drivers in advance, how can you evaluate candidates properly?

Yet, most hiring processes fail at this first, critical step.

👉 Hiring managers assume they "just know" who will succeed.

👉 Interviews turn into casual conversations, not structured evaluations.

👉 Decisions are made based on gut instinct, personal connections, or snap judgments.

This is not how high-performing teams are built.

That’s why Step 1 in any merit-based hiring process is to properly define the role through a structured Job Intake process.

This forces hiring managers to think critically about what they actually need. Instead of defaulting to “find someone like the last person,” they must define what will make a new hire successful.

Secondly once this is clear, we design the hiring process accordingly—outlining:

✔ What each interview will assess

✔ Who will be responsible for evaluating what

✔ How candidates will be compared fairly

✔ Everything captured in scorecards with a 5 scale scoring for each item and example questions.

When done correctly, this process alone eliminates most hiring mistakes.

2️⃣ Structured Screening & Interviewing

Structured hiring means:

✔ Every interview has a clear purpose (what is being assessed and why)

✔ Every interviewer asks standardized questions (ensuring fair comparisons)

✔ Every candidate is scored based on pre-defined success drivers

📋 Example: If “problem-solving” is a key success driver, it should be clearly defined with:

❓ What does great problem-solving look like in this role?

❓ What questions, assessment, or case study will assess it?

By eliminating unstructured, casual interviews, we eliminate bias and focus on actual ability.

3️⃣ Decision Meetings: Removing Subjectivity from Hiring

❌ No more hiring managers making solo decisions.

❌ No more “I liked them” or “I had a good feeling” justifications.

❌ No more bias-based reasoning.

In a decision meeting, all interviewers:

✔ Cast their votes before discussing candidates (to avoid influence)

✔ Compare candidates against the defined success criteria (not against each other)

✔ Use structured discussion to reach a clear, defensible hiring decision

Teams can choose:

🔹 Majority Voting System – The candidate with the most "yes" votes gets hired.

🔹 Unanimous Voting System – Only candidates with full approval move forward.

The key? Hiring decisions are based on data, not gut instinct.

4️⃣ Measuring Success: How Do You Know If It’s Working?

If merit-based hiring is done correctly, it should lead to measurable improvements in:

📈 Quality of Hire (QoH):

✔ Asking both hiring managers and new hires after a few months on the job:

• "How good of a fit is this employee for the role & company?"
• "How good of a fit is this role & company for you?"

📉 Lower First-Year Attrition:

✔ If employees are leaving within 12 months, your hiring process is failing.

✔ Exit surveys should track if success drivers were misjudged.

With Merit Based hiring exit interviews now also finally make sense, because you can directly ask which of the defined success drivers fell short on company or candidate side, providing valuable input to improve the hiring process.

This is a Culture Shift, Not Just a Process Fix

Rome wasn’t built in a day—and neither is a fully merit-based hiring process.

💡 Think big, start small.

This is not just a process change—it’s a cultural shift in how hiring decisions are made. If you approach it as a process change project, you will get frustrated fast. (believe me I have been there :) You are running a culture change project. This means changing ingrained behaviors, shifting mindsets, and redefining what “good hiring” actually looks like.

And that takes time.

For many hiring managers, this approach challenges everything they believe about hiring. Some have been selecting talent based on gut feeling for 20 years. Others believe that hiring decisions are theirs alone. And realise you are telling them how to do their job differently. If you force everything at once, you will face resistance. Instead, your goal should be to build new habits first, then refine the process over time. (Yes this is taking a page from Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the most influential books on how I organize my life professionally and personally I have ever read. If you haven’t; go read it)

Where to Start Tomorrow: The 4 Minimum Steps

📌 1️⃣ Introduce job intake meetings for every open role. Even if a job is already open, take a step back and answer the two critical questions:

• What skills & competencies do we need to replace with this person leaving?
• What skills & competencies should we add to the team now that we have the opportunity to hire someone new?

If these questions haven’t been answered, what are you really selecting for? This single step changes how hiring managers think about what they actually need.

📌 2️⃣ Start using scorecards—even if they are basic. A simple scorecard with a 5-point rating system for key skills and competencies is already a huge step forward. Even if hiring managers push back on structured interviews, just getting them to rate candidates on defined criteria forces a shift from gut feeling to structured data gathering.

📌 3️⃣ Implement decision meetings—even in the lightest form. Many hiring managers make final hiring decisions in isolation, sometimes not even consulting their interviewers.The first step is not to force a fully collaborative decision process but simply to ensure that all interviewers provide structured input before a final decision is made, even if that means they all share their input and the hiring manager still decides. If all interviewers are just having a discussion based on the selection criteria before the hiring manager decides it is already an absolute win.

📌 4️⃣ Measure Quality of Hire—because if you don’t measure it, you don’t improve.

The simplest way to do this?

✔ Net Promoter Score (NPS)-based Quality of Hire measurement.

• Ask hiring managers: “How good of a fit is this new hire for the role & company?” (0-10 scale)
• Ask new hires: “How good of a fit is this role & company for you?” (0-10 scale)

🚨 If hiring quality isn’t improving, you are selecting on the wrong criteria.

🚨 If first-year attrition isn’t decreasing, you are missing something in your hiring process.

Final Thought: Build Habits First, Then Scale.

You can’t enforce all of this at once. If you do, you’ll get pushback, confusion, and frustration. But if you embed these behaviors slowly, over time, they become the default way of hiring.

💬 Where is your company struggling most with hiring? Drop a comment.

📩 Looking to implement Merit-Based Hiring or refine what you've already started? Let's talk. Drop me a DM.