Selection criteria: what merit alone cannot guarantee
When an organisation recruits, experience and education can both provide legitimate grounds for selection. The precise managerial question is whether their relative importance should be set before applications are reviewed, rather than while they are being compared.
What the literature establishes
Eric Luis Uhlmann and Geoffrey L. Cohen (2005, Psychological Science) show in selection experiments that participants can redefine merit to favour the qualifications of the candidate whose gender matches the occupational stereotype. It is therefore not only assessments of individuals that change: the definition of a good candidate itself becomes flexible. In one of their experiments, committing to criteria in advance eliminates the gender discrimination observed in the comparison condition.
The mechanism: acceptable reasons for a biased choice
Michael I. Norton, Joseph A. Vandello and John M. Darley (2004, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that choices influenced by social categories can be justified through seemingly neutral attributes. Participants can favour an attribute because it supports their preference, while presenting it as the reason for their choice. A professionally acceptable justification is therefore not sufficient to establish that the criterion guided the decision rather than the reverse.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that a framework agreed in advance makes every selection impartial. These studies do not support that conclusion: predefined criteria may themselves be poorly related to the actual work or disadvantage certain profiles without sufficient job-related justification. The value of prior commitment is narrower: it limits the scope for shifting requirements to favour a particular applicant. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not guarantee
These experiments isolate a mechanism under controlled conditions; they do not establish the size of its effect in recruitment in Fribourg. In practice, discovering an unexpected skill may also justify revising the criteria. What needs scrutiny is therefore not every change as such, but whether it is justified by the requirements of the role and applied consistently to all applicants.
A practical check in Fribourg
For recruitment in the agri-food sector, a bilingual industrial company or a team connected to Fribourg’s university hub, record the criteria, their relative importance and the evidence required to assess them before opening applications. Tailor this document to the role — understanding production constraints, professional use of French and German, scientific skills — rather than treating it as a universal template. At the end, calculate the proportion of criteria added or reweighted after applications were reviewed, then check each change for a dated justification and a reassessment of all applicants. Within the SHR — Swiss Human Resources “Decision-making” programme, this exercise can serve as a traceability check, without treating a low rate of change as proof of fairness. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Decision-making in Fribourg
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