The audition problem I read this week about firms running X Factor-style recruitment. Candidates pitch ideas on stage. Panel of judges. Live audience. The whole thing. My first thought: who is this actually for? Not the candidate. Not the business. It is for the people who designed it. It is theatre dressed up as rigour. I have worked with enough small teams to know what happens when you optimise hiring for spectacle. You end up with people who are brilliant at performing under pressure but average at the actual work. Meanwhile, the person who would have quietly transformed your operations decided the process was not worth the humiliation and applied somewhere else. Confidence is not competence There is a specific failure mode here. When you make someone pitch in front of an audience, you are testing one thing above all else: their comfort with being watched. That is useful if you are hiring a presenter or a salesperson who needs to command a room. It is useless if you need someone to build systems, manage projects, or think carefully about problems that do not have obvious answers. The best operations person I ever worked with would have bombed a stage pitch. She spoke slowly. She paused to think. She would have looked uncertain next to someone more polished. But she could see a broken process and fix it in a week. She saved one business I know of around £40,000 a year by redesigning how they handled returns. She would never have made it past a panel of judges. What you are actually selecting for When you turn hiring into performance, you are selecting for: People who enjoy being the centre of attention People who can think on their feet but not necessarily think deeply People who prioritise looking good over being accurate People who have the social confidence that usually comes from privilege You are filtering out: Introverts who do excellent work quietly People with anxiety who perform brilliantly once they settle in Anyone who thinks the process is beneath them People from backgrounds where "pitching yourself" was never taught That last one matters more than most businesses realise. I have seen brilliant people from working-class backgrounds who never learned to sell themselves because no one ever told them they were allowed to. They are not worse at the job. They are worse at the audition. The retail sector gets something right UK retailers announced this week they are creating 100,000 placements for young people out of work. John Lewis, M&S, and others partnering with DWP to offer 18 to 24-year-olds a way in. This is the opposite of the pitch-stage approach. It says: we will give you a chance to show what you can do, over time, in the actual environment. We will not decide in fifteen minutes whether you are worth employing. Placements are not perfect. But they acknowledge something the X Factor model ignores: you learn more about someone in a week of real work than you do in an hour of performance. Why businesses do this anyway I think the honest answer is that theatrical hiring feels decisive. It gives the people running it a story to tell. "We put them through their paces. We really tested them." But the test does not measure what you need to measure. It measures something else and calls it the same thing. I have seen this with clients at ALIRA. Someone will say they want to hire for "resilience" or "initiative" and then design a process that actually tests for extroversion. They are not the same. An introvert can be deeply resilient. A confident performer can crumble the moment things get difficult. The mismatch happens because people do not define what they actually need before designing the process. They start with an idea of what a "good" candidate looks like, and that image is usually someone who reminds them of themselves. What actually works The best hiring I have seen is boring. It looks like this: Write down the three things this person will actually do in the first six months. Not skills. Tasks. Design a way to see them do a version of that work. A short project. A working session. Something where you watch them think, not perform. Talk to them like a person. Ask what they have done, how it went, what they learned. Listen for specifics, not polish. This takes longer than a pitch competition. It is less exciting. It does not make for a good LinkedIn post. But it finds people who can do the work. I use the 5 Whys tool on alira.london with people who are struggling to hire well. Usually the problem is not that candidates are weak. The problem is that the business has not defined what success actually looks like, so they are testing for vague qualities instead of real capabilities. The JLR lesson Jaguar Land Rover announced 4,000 job cuts this week. Experts are already saying it might limit their ability to build new things in the future. This is what happens when you lose the wrong people. Not because JLR ran pitch competitions, but because the principle is the same: when you do not think carefully about who you need and why, you end up with gaps you cannot fill. Small businesses face this at a different scale but with higher stakes. If you have a team of five and you hire the wrong person because they were impressive on stage, you have not just wasted a salary. You have lost months. You have damaged morale. You have delayed the thing you were trying to build. What to do this week Write down the actual tasks. Before you post a job or start interviewing, list the three to five things this person will do in their first ninety days. Not "manage projects" but "run the weekly client call and keep the tracker updated." Specifics. Design a work sample. Give candidates a small piece of real work and watch how they approach it. A thirty-minute exercise tells you more than a sixty-minute interview. Pay them for it if you can. Ask yourself who you are filtering out. Look at your process and ask: would a quiet, competent person make it through? If the answer is no, you have designed it wrong.