There is a need to address the missing link between the level of responsibility entrusted to people and the failures they often exhibit. What metrics should be used to assess whether someone is truly fit for a role? It is clear that corrupt assignment practices based on social relations, ethnic ties, godfatherly favors, and nepotism—forms of identity-based patronage—seriously undermine fairness and narrow the space for merit and healthy competition. This impedes meaningful progress and weakens useful institutional practice. How can we create a rational space that allows capable and skilled individuals to emerge, discharge their responsibilities effectively, and contribute to the betterment of the system?
Many people say the answer is simple: merit-based competency frameworks and transparent track-record verification, supported by oversight and qualification documents that testify to an individual’s experience. But the challenge is that most credential letters from different organizations have become routine instruments of politeness. They often provide warm exit statements, glowing testimonials, and flattering language that wish departing employees well, regardless of actual performance. This creates a weak link between real competence and the documents that are supposed to prove it.
Many organizations default to issuing sanitized exit letters to avoid conflict or to show undue favor. If hiring or promotion decisions rely heavily on such credential letters, the system becomes merit-based in name but patronage-based in practice, because the verification layer is soft and easily manipulated.
This is one of the most frustrating and pervasive challenges in organizational governance. Credential inflation is not a problem limited to one department or one institution. It is a systemic issue that contributes to the failure of many institutions.
To create a rational space where truly capable people can emerge, organizations must stop relying on proxy metrics to evaluate quality. Genuine mechanisms must be developed to bypass soft verification layers and accurately assess a person’s fitness for a role.
To reduce the influence of nepotism and generic recommendation letters, assessment metrics must be observable, quantifiable, and difficult to fake. Instead of simply asking candidates whether they can do a job, give them a real slice of the work. This might mean presenting them with a current, anonymized crisis the organization is facing and asking them to draft a turnaround strategy or complete a similar practical test as a gate exam.
An effective assessment should examine how an individual responds to high-stakes, ethically complex, or ambiguous situations. This helps test judgment and character, not just technical knowledge. During the assessment, candidates should also be required to provide verifiable metrics from a project that failed under their watch, along with the structural changes they implemented to fix it. If they can offer only vague or generic explanations, that should be treated as a warning sign rather than as proof of capability.
Subordinates and peers often know a leader’s true capability better than the executives who hired them. That is why incorporating blind evaluations from a candidate’s former peers—not just their superiors—can help pierce the veil of favoritism in the assessment process. This would reduce the flaws in traditional verification.
It is also possible to conduct background checks by reaching out to shared connections, former clients, or external stakeholders who worked with the candidate, in order to obtain supporting evidence. Going deeper into claimed achievements by asking how they were accomplished, what the budget was, and who else was on the team can help expose exaggerated credit and provide stronger evidence of competence.
Unless fair metrics are established, capable people will continue to be blocked by a traditional evaluation system that relies too heavily on flattering credential letters. There is a serious need to build firewalls against identity-based patronage.
Removing names, gender markers, ethnic identifiers, and even the names of specific universities from the first round of application screening can help evaluators assess candidates more objectively, based purely on their answers to technical or situational questions. This immediately reduces the advantage of social connection at the starting line.
There is also a need for panel-based decisions rather than solo hires. Otherwise, nepotism thrives in the dark, especially when one powerful individual has unilateral hiring and firing power. Decisions for critical roles should be made by a diverse panel that includes stakeholders from outside the immediate department. Each panel member should use a strict, pre-agreed scoring rubric so that subjective “gut feelings” are minimized.
In addition, the best way to counter inflated resumes is to enforce rigorous probationary periods and make the first phase of employment a genuine test. Clear, objective Key Performance Indicators should be set from day one. If the employee fails to meet them because they lack the competence their resume claimed, the contract should be terminated. Probation must stop being a rubber stamp and become the final, most rigorous phase of the hiring process.
A committee or process that automatically approves decisions without real review, critical thinking, or oversight—or a board that simply agrees with whatever the CEO or senior official wants—creates a fatal flaw in the hiring system.
When an employee is hired on probation or a trial period, management has a chance to decide on permanent employment based on actual performance. This may also help address the wider problem of poor educational outcomes that have long gone unnoticed in our country.
This approach can help diagnose persistent problems of nepotism, credential inflation, and rubber-stamp oversight with concrete, observable solutions. It can serve as a comprehensive and effective blueprint for institutional reform.
The recent reality in the national education system, where exam pass rates reportedly dropped to around 3 percent after strict anti-cheating and standardized verification measures were enforced, mirrors this institutional crisis. For years, the education system suffered from its own version of credential inflation. Students advanced, grades were awarded, and certificates were printed, but the verification layer was weak. In that sense, the existence of such a problem is no surprise.
If the credentialing layer that is supposed to certify competence is itself inflated, then every downstream mechanism that relies on “checking the qualification document” is inheriting a corrupted signal from the very beginning. The exit-letter problem described earlier is not an isolated organizational failure; it is the same soft-verification pathology recurring at an earlier stage of the pipeline.
A student who advances through a system with weak grading standards becomes a job candidate with an inflated transcript, who then enters a workplace that hires partly on transcript strength and warm credential letters that serve as testimony for evaluators. Sometimes, someone who was never rigorously tested later sits on a committee to judge whether others meet a standard they themselves never had to clear. In that way, each layer normalizes the next.
Verification is not a single checkpoint; it is a chain. A weak link anywhere upstream propagates forward. A 3 percent pass rate under strict verification, compared with the pass rate under the old regime, is itself a measurement of how much slack had built up in the system. That gap reveals the scale of the inflation problem for the first time.
This matters because “fixing the missing link” and “making up for the fact that it has been missing” are two different projects. You cannot simply restore rigorous verification going forward and call the problem solved. You are left with a large existing population of graduates, credential holders, and evaluators whose paper trail was produced under a broken system.
I believe this reveals a structural failure and the need to rebuild meritocracy from education to employment. We must address the whole missing link in the system and fix the problem through competency-based frameworks.
