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This right here. This is a better way of describing what I was getting at. Most important decisions people make aren't based on a true understanding or evaluation of "merit". We make up shortcuts as a proxy for making hard decisions.
"I don't actually know how to evaluate things like enthusiasm and kindness and loyalty. So I'm just gonna choose to ascribe a ton of artificial significance to this one act of sending a thank you note. I'm sure that'll be fine."
It's not my goal to indict this particular person for leaning on those shortcuts. We all do it. And we all need to work on pushing back against that incentive. What's really a problem is when we perpetuate these barriers by talking about these things as if they are good ideas.
This person not only made that choice for themselves. They really came out here like a thoughtleader trying to persuade people that artificially eliminating whole swaths of candidates based on one arbitrary action was a *good* thing.
Don't miss this, because it's literally one of the forms that systemic barriers take. You can deny people who don't write thank you notes and still tell yourself you're a good person. But a whole set of people who never learned that particular social nicety are impacted forever.
These ppl have to try to figure out every day why they didn't get a callback. And it's entirely based on an artificially constructed social barrier that they may never learn about. Or it's one of dozens that they're trying to keep up with and they don't know which ones matter.
All of this energy is being expended and *none* of it has anything to do with whether people have the "merit" to do a particular job. We don't even know what this woman is hiring for! It didn't even come up.
Part of the reason why this work is so hard is it involves us losing a lot of our shortcuts. It's not something I take for granted. It's going to make this manager's life harder if they can't lean on these problematic social constructs. That is the sacrifice that change requires.
Exactly. It's not even widely accept that this gives you an advantage. You do this at some places and it works against you. This is what I mean when I tell y'all that most of this stuff is made up.
There is no magic. Everything you see around you is just humans making decisions about other humans. Some of those decisions are hugely impactful. And our goal should be to reduce and mitigate the harm that our decisions cause to others.
