Scholars have described how neutral routines and ‘objective’ criteria in recruitment may result in an institutional preference for certain types of candidates. This article advances the literature on recruitment by conducting an in-depth study of how the criteria for assessing quality are applied in practice in the recruitment process. Through an in-depth study of 48 recruitment cases for permanent academic positions in Norway and 52 qualitative interviews with the recruiters involved, we stress the need to grasp how evaluation is embedded in the organisational process of recruitment. By constructing an ideal type of recruitment process comprising five different steps, we show that despite evaluators including diversity concerns in their search for talent during the first stages of the recruitment process, they end up deploying narrow criteria that tend to favour men in the crucial steps of the recruitment process, in which hiring outcomes are determined.

学者们描述了招聘中的中立惯例和“客观”标准如何导致对某些类型候选人的机构偏好。本文通过深入研究如何在招聘过程中实际应用质量评估标准来推进有关招聘的文献。通过对挪威 48 个长期学术职位招聘案例的深入研究以及对相关招聘人员的 52 次定性访谈，我们强调需要掌握评估如何嵌入到组织过程中的招聘。通过构建包含五个不同步骤的理想招聘流程类型，我们表明，尽管评估人员在招聘流程的第一阶段在寻找人才时考虑了多样性问题，但他们最终部署了倾向于在关键步骤中偏向男性的狭隘标准招聘流程，其中确定招聘结果。