Issue No. 4 • 7 April 2026 • Author: Joonatan Hongell
Browse apartment listings in Helsinki and you'll notice the same words showing up everywhere. "Bright." "Spacious." "Central location." "Modern updates." Together they describe roughly half the listings on the market. A buyer who reads "bright, spacious apartment in a central location" has learned that the apartment is an apartment.
Hiring criteria do the same thing. A hiring manager opens an intake meeting and says "I need a strong communicator who's strategic, collaborative, and has good leadership skills." The hiring manager puts those words on the scorecard and assigns them numerical weights. They describe every professional role in the building.
Clifford Geertz describes the problem in his book The Interpretation of Cultures, and I'm probably flattening his argument here, but it goes something like this. Mid-century anthropologists tried to identify values shared by all human cultures. They kept arriving at statements like "Zuñi and Kwakiutl both prize the distinctive norms of their culture." Which is a tautology. Every group values what it values. By trying to be universal, they had stripped out everything useful. Geertz called the results "vague tautologies and forceless banalities," which is probably the best description of a generic competency framework I've ever read.
You start with something concrete and observable, like "this engineer writes reproduction steps before touching code and narrows the problem down to the smallest failing case." You abstract it to "problem-solving." Abstract further to "all roles require problem-solving." At each step the statement becomes harder to argue with and easier to ignore. The final version is true of every candidate who has ever held a professional job.
The recruiter sees it coming. It happens in intake meetings anyway. The hiring manager says "strategic thinking." The recruiter asks what that actually looks like. She gets a good answer. "Deciding which of three product lines to prioritize when the budget only supports two". "Keeping a vendor relationship alive during a contract renegotiation". Specific enough to score against.
But somewhere between that conversation and the scorecard, the specificity dissolves. Three interviewers who weren't in the intake meeting need criteria they can all use. The timeline tightens. The panel sands down every specific edge until only things everyone can nod at remain. The scorecard ends up saying "strategic thinking" anyway.
Some criteria are genuinely meant to be universal. Safety culture in mining, ethical standards in regulated industries. Their universality is the point. The problem starts when the dimensions that should tell candidates apart have that same character.
The scoring stage is where the damage gets specific. Two interviewers both rate a candidate 3 out of 5 on "communication," one of them interviewing in her second language. They feel like they agree. But one was evaluating whether the candidate spoke clearly in conversation, while the other was thinking about written documentation skills under deadline pressure. The numbers match. The things being measured don't. You get a tidy spreadsheet that looks like measurement but is closer to decoration.
"I just didn't feel the strategic thinking was there" is unfalsifiable when "strategic thinking" was never defined in terms anyone could observe and verify. The debrief becomes a contest of confidence. Whoever speaks with the most authority wins. The scorecard sits in the background providing cover.
The intake meeting is the last moment where you can prevent this. Vague criteria shape the job ad, the sourcing, and the shortlist before a single interview happens. Then they spread through every score and every debrief.
Most experienced recruiters already get a real answer when they ask what "strong leadership" means. The hard part is making that answer survive contact with the process. What helps is writing the specific answer onto the scorecard as the actual criterion, not as a note in the intake doc that gets translated back into "strategic thinking" when the panel is assembled. When the hiring manager says "the role needs someone who can rebuild trust with two team leads who are considering leaving and ship Q3 despite inheriting a demoralized team", that sentence goes on the scorecard.
There's a filter that works. Take each criterion on the scorecard and ask whether it would appear just as well for a marketing director, a plant operations manager, and a software architect. If it would, it's probably a fake universal. "Communication skills" fails this test every time. "Translates technical constraints into business trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders in writing, under time pressure" passes it. The only thing separating them is thirty seconds of specificity work during intake.
Most hiring managers who say "strategic, collaborative, strong communicator" know exactly what they need. Picture is in their heads. When the intake meeting doesn't draw it out, the scorecard fills with words that could mean anything. And the debrief becomes an argument about what the words mean. The candidate disappears from the conversation.
Model in this article
Fake Universals (Consensus Gentium Trap): Universal categories become substantively empty through progressive abstraction. The broader you define a trait, the less it distinguishes any particular instance. A category that applies to everything describes nothing.
Discipline: Anthropological theory
Key research: A. L. Kroeber (coined the term); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
The Recruiting Lattice takes mental models from fields like behavioral science, sociology, and decision theory and turns them into practical tools for talent acquisition.