The problem
Fourteen markets, fourteen good processes. That was the honest description, and it was also the problem. Each office had capable recruiters applying a sensible bar, but the bars were not the same bar, and nobody could demonstrate otherwise.
This surfaced most painfully with clients. A partner would ask why a shortlist from one market looked different in character from another, and the only available answer was that different people had assembled them. That is a true answer and a useless one.
Writing the standard down
The instinct, once a team accepts the standard needs writing down, is to write down what they already say out loud. That is where most scorecards die. "Strong consultant." "Client-ready." "Commercial instinct." These read like requirements and function like mirrors: every reviewer sees their own definition, so the scorecard produces the same drift it was meant to prevent, now with a paper trail.
A criterion earns its place when two people reading the same profile reach the same verdict on it. That is a high bar, and it ruled out most of what had been on the intake form.
| Instead of | Deloitte wrote |
|---|---|
| Commercial instinct | Has owned a client relationship worth over 500k in annual fees |
| Strong analytical skills | Has built and defended a financial model used in a live transaction |
| Client-ready | Has presented findings to a client audience at director level or above |
The right-hand column is longer, uglier and testable. Only the last property matters.
What the numbers did
The reopened-candidate figure was the one that persuaded the sceptics. Every reopened candidate represents a rejection somebody later disagreed with, and each one costs the calendar time of a full loop.
The part that keeps it working
Calibration is not a launch activity. Deloitte re-runs the three-interview exercise after every twenty hires, and treats a spread that has not closed as evidence that the anchors are wrong rather than that the people are.
Structured hiring is not a form to fill in. It is a shared definition of the thing being measured, maintained by argument, with the paperwork moved somewhere it cannot interrupt the listening.
