In a regulated practice, a hiring decision has to be explainable months later, sometimes to somebody who was not there. Most of the reasoning lives in inboxes, side conversations and memory, which is exactly where it cannot be retrieved.

Bergwall runs assessments and advisory work under a licence that answers to a professional body, and it hires accordingly: associates, senior consultants, the occasional partner-track hire. Every one of those decisions can be asked about later, by a client, a regulator or an internal review, long after the people involved have moved on.

Reconstruction is not a record

When Bergwall was asked to explain a decision, it usually could, by finding the people involved and asking them to remember. That produces an account rather than evidence, and the account gets thinner the further back the decision sits.

Nobody was hiding anything. The reasoning had simply never been written down at the moment it existed. A hiring manager could describe why a candidate was preferred. But the criteria they were weighing, and the order they weighed them in, had to be rebuilt from memory each time somebody asked.

The firm hires across roughly 40 senior roles a year, spread across four practice groups, each with its own panel of interviewers. A query about any one of those decisions could land on somebody’s desk a year after the hire started.

The record as a by-product

Bergwall uses Yardstick Agents so the criteria, the scores and the reasons are written down as the process runs, not reconstructed afterwards. The decision stays the hiring manager’s; the trail is produced by the work rather than in addition to it.

Criteria are fixed before the first application is read, which is the part that makes the record defensible. A rubric written after the shortlist is a justification, and anybody reviewing it can tell. Each criterion carries a weight agreed by the practice group lead before sourcing opens, and that weighting does not move once candidates are in view.

As applications come in, Yardstick Agents scores each one against the fixed rubric and logs the evidence behind the score. That evidence is a specific answer, a work sample, a credential, never a bare number. The hiring manager reads the scored file, not a black box, and can see exactly what a score is standing on.

Departures are recorded too

Where a manager departs from the rubric, and they do, the departure and its reason are recorded alongside the score. An exception that is documented is defensible. An exception that is invisible is the thing the record exists to prevent. Nothing is rejected automatically: every score is a recommendation the manager can accept, adjust or override, and an override without a reason attached cannot be saved.

A record instead of a memory

Reconstructing a past hiring decision now takes 90% less time than it did before the rubric was fixed and logged at the point of scoring. Where an answer once meant tracking down two or three people, it now means opening the file.

In the past two quarters, Bergwall has answered 38 audit and client-review requests directly from the record, without reassembling a decision from memory. Every one of those requests was closed with the file that already existed, not a new account written for the occasion.

All rubric exceptions are recorded with a reason: 100% of the departures logged this year carry the manager’s note explaining why. What still happens by hand is the final reference check. Bergwall keeps that as a phone call, on the view that a referee speaks more freely off the record than on one.

Extending the record to promotions

Bergwall is extending the same rubric-and-record approach to promotion decisions, which face a similar question from the same regulator, at a slower pace.