Ask the Analyst: Are unwritten hiring rules selecting for capability or privilege-based social conditioning?

Every week for The Briefing, UNLEASH’s weekly intelligence email for senior business decision-makers, we ask our community of analysts – the true HR experts – to solve the biggest workplace challenges.

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We asked: When organizations filter out candidates for not knowing the unwritten rules, are they selecting for capability, or for the kind of social conditioning that comes with privilege?

Here what’s the analysts had to say.

Al Adamsen, Founder & Managing Director, Adaptive Futures:

When filtering out candidates for not knowing unwritten rules, organizations are definitely not selecting for capability. They might hope to assess likely effectiveness, but depending on where in the selection process this filtering out occurs, such decisions can be clumsy, misleading, unethical, and potentially illegal.

Are they filtering out candidates because they believe that ignoring unwritten rules means someone won't "fit" within the culture – a set of perceived, often subjective social norms? Assessing candidates effectively takes time, and if adequate time isn't allotted to assess certain behaviors, then snap judgements can be made. Furthermore, if "rules" aren't written down and adequately socialized, are they really rules? Expecting people to understand, let alone follow, unwritten expectations can be grossly unfair.

That said, some social norms – unwritten rules – are foundational: chewing with your mouth closed, not interrupting people, not being rude. These are table stakes. In most cases, these behaviors must already be in place to even be considered for a role.

In the end, when recruiters and hiring managers filter by "unwritten rules," are they perpetuating their own conscious and unconscious biases, or acting on a genuine belief that violating these norms harms the individual and the organization? Ultimately, it is best to make conscious decisions based on fairly obtained facts and virtuous intent.

Cheney Hamilton, Research Director | FusionWork Category, Bloor Research International:

Mostly privilege, but the bigger failure is the organisation's own. An unwritten rule is only unwritten because nobody has done the work of writing it down. When a candidate is marked down for not knowing how to "read the room", the organisation is really admitting it can't say what the job needs.

Our research at Bloor found that around 90% of people have a job description that doesn't describe their actual job. The unwritten rules fill that gap, and people who grew up around professional norms fill it without noticing. Everyone else gets called a poor culture fit.

So what's being selected for is familiarity with the rules, not the ability to learn them. Those are very different things. The ability to learn the rules is capability. Already knowing them is usually a sign of where someone started. Now add AI. Screening tools trained on past "successful" hires will learn the unwritten rules as if they were performance signals, then apply them at scale and with a straight face. The bias ends up baked into the data, the model and the decision.

The fix is simple, if not comfortable. If a rule matters to performance, write it down, teach it and assess it openly. If you can't explain why it matters, stop screening for it. Otherwise you're not hiring for capability. You're hiring people who already know the rules.

Nicole Roberts, Industry Analyst, 3Sixty Insights:

The iced coffee debate is a perfect example of why organizations need to examine what they are actually measuring in an interview. Every workplace has norms, and some matter. Judgment, communication, and awareness of your audience may all be relevant to the job. But there is a meaningful difference between assessing those capabilities and assessing whether someone already knows a set of unwritten rules they were never given.

If a candidate arrives on time, prepared, engaged, and qualified, but the presence of an iced coffee suddenly causes you to question their professionalism, the more useful question may be why you assigned that meaning to the coffee in the first place. Maybe they wanted caffeine to help them stay sharp. Maybe they did not want to be parched while answering questions. Maybe it is simply part of their morning routine. None of those explanations tells us anything meaningful about whether they can do the job.

When neutral behaviors become evidence of “professionalism,” organizations can start selecting for social conditioning instead of capability. What feels like common sense to someone steeped in corporate culture may simply be learned behavior, and access to that learning is not evenly distributed. That does not mean abandoning standards. It means examining them. If an expectation matters, make it clear. If it is a capability, assess it intentionally. Otherwise, be careful about turning unwritten preferences into hidden hiring criteria.

David Forry, Sr. Vice President, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group:

I don’t think every unwritten rule is inherently a product of privilege. Some expectations exist for good reasons. But when we can’t explain why a behavior matters to someone’s ability to succeed in the role, we should question why it’s influencing the hiring decision.

Take the iced coffee debate. Candidates should recognize that interviews are short and impressions matter. How you show up will always be part of a human interaction. But knowing every subtle rule of interviewing can also reflect exposure. Some people have been coached on those rules, surrounded by them, or learned them through years of professional experience. Others haven’t.

That’s where employers need to be disciplined. Notice the coffee. Notice the clothes. Notice whatever you naturally notice. Then ask: Does this actually tell me something about this person’s capability? If three candidates can all do the job, I’d rather break the tie with evidence than etiquette.