Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil · September 2026
Universities rarely describe their recruitment practices as unfair. Vacancies are advertised, criteria are published, panels are convened, questions are asked and scores are recorded. Yet the existence of a formal process does not necessarily guarantee a fair outcome. Drawing on seven years of experience within UK higher education, this article examines how familiarity, professional networks, discretionary judgement and procedural legitimacy can create cumulative advantages for some people while leaving others to bear potentially devastating consequences for their careers and livelihoods. The central question is not simply whether the process was followed, but whether the process itself provided meaningful competition, equivalent opportunity and a genuine possibility of an outcome that those holding institutional power had not already anticipated.
In 2021, I wrote an article entitled Kinship, Cronyism & Others in Private and Public Spaces. It arose partly from a conversation with a friend after I described patterns of inequality that I was witnessing in academia.
His response was memorable:
“They’re not being racist; they’re simply protecting their own!”
I disagreed with the simplicity of that distinction, but his statement prompted a question that has stayed with me:
What does “their own” mean within a public institution?
Kinship is deeply human. We gravitate towards people we know. Familiarity generates trust. Shared experiences facilitate relationships. In our homes, friendship groups, community organisations and places of worship, choosing whom we spend time with is an ordinary exercise of personal freedom.
Universities, however, are not private spaces.
They distribute highly consequential opportunities: employment, salaries, professional recognition, promotion, leadership positions, research opportunities, access to influential networks and the experience from which further opportunities emerge.
When people holding institutional power repeatedly favour those they already know, trust or understand, the consequences therefore extend beyond personal preference.
Yet this does not necessarily look like discrimination.
It may look like good judgement.
It may look like reducing risk.
It may look like appointing someone whose capabilities are already known.
It may simply look like common sense.
That is precisely what makes the phenomenon worth examining.
In my 2021 article, I explored this through a simple experiment involving conferences I had organised.
For several years, my Creativity Conferences had attracted people from strikingly diverse backgrounds. Participants came from different ethnicities, genders, professions, nationalities and backgrounds.
I subsequently organised leadership events primarily through my Sikh networks.
Unsurprisingly, the resulting participant group looked dramatically different.
I had not imposed an exclusionary rule.
I had simply changed three things:
Proximity — I approached people within my existing networks.
Familiarity — they were people I knew, liked, trusted or respected.
Scope — I framed the activity around particular areas of shared expertise, values and experience.
The outcome changed dramatically.
The exercise demonstrated how easily we can create spaces in our own image without consciously deciding to exclude anyone.
That insight now seems particularly relevant to academic recruitment.
Who is already close to those making appointments?
Whose capabilities have already been witnessed?
Who is trusted?
Who understands the institution’s language?
Whose professional background feels familiar?
Whose conception of leadership resembles that of existing leaders?
Who enters the process as an unknown quantity?
No single answer establishes unfairness.
Repeated across an organisation and across time, however, small advantages can profoundly influence who progresses and who remains outside the circles through which opportunity travels.
One of my earliest experiences at the university brought the tension between formal process and meaningful competition into unusually sharp focus.
During a team meeting, a senior manager spoke about the forthcoming recruitment of someone to manage our team. A particular colleague was identified as the anticipated appointee.
Formal recruitment procedures would, we were told, still be followed.
But there would be:
“a shortlist of one.”
I have returned to that phrase many times.
It captures an important distinction between following a recruitment process and conducting a genuinely open competition.
A vacancy can be advertised.
An application can be submitted.
Shortlisting documentation can be completed.
An interview can take place.
A scoring sheet can exist.
HR requirements can be satisfied.
The documentary record can therefore demonstrate that a process occurred.
But that does not necessarily answer a different question:
How open was the outcome when the process began?
In 2025, organisational restructuring created three leadership roles within my area.
The opportunities were allocated through Expressions of Interest.
There were:
three roles;
three Expressions of Interest;
and ultimately:
three appointments.
All three colleagues who expressed an interest received one of the available roles without competitive interviews being necessary.
This was clearly not identical to the earlier “shortlist of one.” One involved a recruitment process; the other involved Expressions of Interest associated with organisational restructuring.
But viewed through the lens of meaningful competition, there is an important structural similarity:
one candidate for one opportunity; three interested candidates for three opportunities.
Neither numerical correspondence establishes that the people appointed were necessarily unsuitable. Nor does it establish that an institutional policy was explicitly breached.
That is not my argument.
The more interesting question is:
What do we mean when we say that an opportunity has been distributed through a “process”?
If three roles exist and precisely three people express an interest, and all three receive those roles without interview, the existence of an Expression of Interest process does not in itself tell us how rigorously suitability, readiness or competing claims to those opportunities were tested.
This becomes particularly important when the roles confer not merely additional responsibilities but managerial authority over other members of staff.
This issue became personally significant because one of the successful colleagues subsequently became my line manager.
The previous year, I had successfully applied for promotion to Grade 9.
My new manager was still on Grade 8.
I raised a concern about this arrangement.
I was told, in effect, that it was normal within academia for someone on a lower grade to manage someone on a higher grade and that the appropriate processes had been followed through the Expressions of Interest.
There may indeed be circumstances in universities in which somebody on a lower salary grade appropriately manages somebody on a higher grade.
Grade alone does not establish managerial competence, and I am not arguing for a universal rule that a lower-graded colleague should never manage a higher-graded colleague.
My concern arose from the combination of circumstances.
Three leadership roles had been created.
Three people expressed an interest.
All three received the roles.
There were no competitive interviews.
One of the resulting appointments placed managerial authority over me in the hands of a colleague on a lower grade, while I had myself successfully undergone a competitive process for promotion to Grade 9 the previous year.
I questioned that arrangement.
The institutional response focused substantially upon two propositions:
this was normal in academia;
and
the process had been followed.
Both statements are important because they reveal something about how normalised organisational practices can become insulated from deeper scrutiny.
Something can be normal without necessarily being fair.
Equally:
a process can be followed without the existence of that process answering the substantive concern being raised.
The two episodes occurred at very different points in my university career.
One occurred close to the beginning.
The other occurred close to the end.
In the first, I heard that formal processes would be followed but that there would be a:
“shortlist of one.”
In the second, there were:
three Expressions of Interest for three roles.
The procedures were different.
The structural question was strikingly similar:
When the number of candidates effectively matches the number of opportunities, what work is the selection process actually doing?
Competitive recruitment matters partly because competition introduces the possibility of comparison, challenge and surprise.
It requires candidates to demonstrate suitability.
It requires decision-makers to compare evidence.
It creates the possibility that the person initially expected to succeed may not prove to be the strongest candidate.
And importantly, it can create opportunities for people outside established networks to compete for positions that might otherwise circulate among people already close to institutional power.
When meaningful competition disappears, some of those safeguards disappear with it.
A process may remain procedurally legitimate.
But its capacity to disrupt existing distributions of opportunity may be considerably weaker.
Across my seven years in academia, I also observed senior colleagues recruiting people with whom they had previously worked at other universities.
In one instance, a senior colleague recruited someone with whom he had worked particularly closely at another university, including sharing an office.
In another, a manager subsequently recruited a former colleague from his previous university.
There may have been entirely legitimate reasons for both appointments.
Previous professional acquaintance does not demonstrate that someone lacks merit, and knowing a successful candidate does not make an appointment improper.
The more interesting question is:
What additional advantage does familiarity confer within a process that formally treats candidates as though they begin from an equal position?
Consider two capable candidates.
One is already known.
Decision-makers may have witnessed that person’s competence over several years. They understand their communication style. They know how the person responds under pressure. They may already trust their judgement.
If an interview response is ambiguous, existing knowledge can provide reassuring context.
The other candidate is unfamiliar.
Their credibility must largely be established through an application form, perhaps a presentation, and a relatively short interview.
Formally, both candidates may receive the same questions.
Substantively, they do not necessarily enter the assessment with the same reservoir of trust.
Familiarity therefore constitutes an advantage that is difficult to capture on a scoring sheet.
Another experience revealed a different problem: the considerable discretion exercised within supposedly standardised interviews.
I applied for senior academic leadership roles.
During one interview, a panel member decided not to ask me the designated Equality, Diversity and Inclusion question because, she explained, I had already addressed the subject through my responses to previous questions.
That might initially sound reasonable.
Why ask a candidate to repeat something she has already demonstrated?
But this panel member scored me only:
3 out of 5.
This creates a straightforward assessment problem.
If my earlier responses provided sufficient evidence for the panel member to decide that the designated question no longer needed to be asked, how could that evidence subsequently justify only a middling score without giving me the opportunity to provide whatever additional evidence was necessary to achieve a higher one?
The significance extends beyond my particular interview.
The panel controls both:
the opportunity to demonstrate competence,
and
the judgement about whether competence has been demonstrated.
That represents considerable discretionary power within a process that can subsequently appear highly objective.
Recruitment documentation possesses enormous institutional authority.
3/5.
Once written onto an interview scoring sheet, the number looks factual.
Someone subsequently examining the recruitment record might reasonably conclude:
The candidate gave an average response.
But the number alone cannot reveal that the candidate was never actually asked the designated question.
This is why numerical scoring should not automatically be confused with objectivity.
Before the number existed, human beings made decisions.
Someone designed the question.
Someone determined what counted as relevant evidence.
Someone decided whether the question needed to be asked.
Someone interpreted the candidate’s previous responses.
Someone decided whether follow-up questions were necessary.
Someone determined what distinguished a 3 from a 4 or a 5.
Eventually, all those layers of human interpretation disappeared behind a single number.
Subjective judgement had become institutional data.
And institutional data can subsequently become evidence of “merit”.
This matters particularly when candidates do not resemble existing organisational norms.
Recruitment panels do not simply discover merit.
To some extent, they construct and interpret it.
They determine what leadership should sound like.
They decide what confidence looks like.
They interpret professionalism, collegiality, strategic thinking and interpersonal effectiveness.
They decide which experience is relevant and which is peripheral.
Consequently, a candidate bringing genuinely different perspectives can be evaluated through assumptions shaped by people already occupying institutional power.
Difference can then become translated into deficiency.
An unconventional answer can be interpreted as strange rather than original.
A strongly values-driven approach can be regarded as insufficiently strategic.
A challenging candidate can become “difficult”.
A different communication style can become an interpersonal concern.
None of these assessments needs explicitly to mention race, gender, disability, class or another protected characteristic.
That is precisely why systemic inequality can be so difficult to recognise.
A later recruitment exercise for three professional roles brought several of these concerns together.
I became concerned about features of the process that, in my view, raised important questions about fairness.
These included the handling of information relating to candidates’ visa or employment status; instructions affecting how particular candidates should be scored; the position of a redeployee who was subsequently made redundant; an interview invitation containing the wrong candidate’s name; and questions that, in my view, advantaged applicants already familiar with particular higher-education contexts.
I raised concerns about aspects of the process.
Each concern could potentially be considered separately.
One might be described as an administrative error.
Another might be explained as an interpretation of policy.
Another might be regarded as having made no difference to the eventual outcome.
Another could be defended as legitimate professional judgement.
This illustrates another important characteristic of systemic unfairness:
fragmentation can make patterns disappear.
When each concern is separated from all the others, every incident may appear too small to justify examination of the overall system.
But systems are not experienced as isolated incidents.
They are experienced cumulatively.
Sometimes:
the pattern is the evidence.
There is a further reason the 2025 Expressions of Interest episode matters to me.
My concern about the resulting management arrangement did not remain an isolated disagreement about organisational design.
My questioning of this arrangement, alongside other concerns I raised, subsequently became part of a much wider institutional interpretation of my behaviour.
That wider behavioural narrative ultimately formed part of the circumstances leading to my summary dismissal.
This experience has forced me to consider another dimension of normalised unfairness:
What happens to the person who refuses to regard the normal as necessarily fair?
If the organisational starting position is:
“This is normal in academia”
and:
“the process was followed,”
then the person continuing to question the arrangement can gradually become constructed as the problem.
Attention can shift from:
Is this arrangement fair?
to:
Why will this employee not accept it?
That is a consequential shift.
A concern about a system can become reframed as a concern about the behaviour of the person challenging the system.
Persistence can become resistance.
Questioning can become difficulty.
Requests for explanation can become evidence of unwillingness to accept authority.
The institution does not necessarily experience itself as defending unfairness. It may experience itself as defending a legitimate process against an employee who will not accept its legitimacy.
This is one reason normalised unfairness can be so resilient.
Universities now possess increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for demonstrating equality.
Recruitment panels receive unconscious-bias training.
EDI questions are included in interviews.
Scoring matrices are standardised.
HR procedures oversee appointments.
Equality policies are published.
Expressions of Interest provide apparently transparent mechanisms for allocating internal opportunities.
Yet none of these mechanisms automatically eliminates the effects of familiarity, discretion or institutional power.
A recruitment process can contain an EDI question and still produce an unfair assessment.
A vacancy can be openly advertised when insiders already anticipate who will be appointed.
Candidates can nominally receive the same assessment while receiving different opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities.
Panels can complete numerical scoring matrices while applying subjective interpretations of merit.
Expressions of Interest can be formally invited without creating meaningful competition.
A successful candidate can be highly capable and benefit from proximity to existing networks.
These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
That is why asking only:
“Was anybody deliberately discriminating?”
is insufficient for understanding systemic inequality.
A more useful question is:
What conditions repeatedly make opportunities easier for some people to access than others?
There is another reason this matters.
Recruitment decisions do not end when somebody receives the job.
They create the conditions for the next decision.
Imagine two employees beginning with broadly comparable capabilities.
One receives a leadership opportunity.
They gain managerial experience, become visible to senior colleagues, participate in strategic meetings and expand their institutional networks.
The other does not.
Three years later, another senior position becomes available.
The first employee now possesses precisely the leadership experience required by the person specification.
The second is told that they lack sufficient strategic or managerial experience.
Viewed independently, both recruitment decisions might appear meritocratic.
Viewed longitudinally, however, the first decision helped manufacture the “merit” subsequently rewarded by the second.
Opportunity produces experience.
Experience produces credibility.
Credibility produces further opportunity.
The reverse can also occur.
Being denied opportunity can restrict experience.
Restricted experience can weaken future applications.
Repeated unsuccessful applications can slow salary progression, reduce professional visibility and constrain access to subsequent leadership opportunities.
This is how apparently separate decisions can contribute to cumulative advantage and cumulative disadvantage.
This became increasingly important as I reflected upon my own seven-year career within one university.
I entered the institution with extensive professional experience and advanced qualifications. During those years, I contributed to teaching, coaching, programme development, professional learning, equality and diversity activity and wider institutional initiatives.
I sought professional recognition and opportunities for progression.
I successfully achieved promotion to Grade 9.
I also experienced unsuccessful attempts at further professional recognition and senior leadership progression.
Near the end of that trajectory, I found myself questioning how three leadership positions had been allocated through three Expressions of Interest without interviews, including an appointment that resulted in a lower-graded colleague becoming my manager.
The institutional position was that this was normal and that appropriate processes had been followed.
My employment ultimately ended in summary dismissal.
I do not suggest that recruitment and progression decisions alone explain that outcome. My employment trajectory was much more complex than that.
But that is precisely the point.
An unsuccessful interview is rarely experienced only as an unsuccessful interview.
Neither is an unsuccessful application.
Nor an Expression of Interest.
Nor exclusion from a developmental opportunity.
Nor a decision about who manages whom.
Each alters the landscape within which the next decision occurs.
If we want to understand inequality within academic careers, therefore, perhaps the appropriate unit of analysis is not simply the incident.
It is the trajectory.
Looking back at the framework I developed in 2021, I would now extend it.
My original analysis focused upon proximity, familiarity and scope.
My subsequent experiences suggest at least five interconnected mechanisms through which apparently ordinary institutional practices can reproduce advantage:
Who is already within our professional networks?
Who hears about opportunities? Who is encouraged to apply? Whose abilities have already been witnessed?
Whom do we already know, understand and trust?
Who enters a recruitment process with an existing reservoir of credibility, and who must construct that credibility from scratch?
Who determines which experience, knowledge and expertise count?
How narrowly have we defined the role? Could our definition of merit inadvertently privilege people whose career histories resemble our own?
Whose behaviour, communication and leadership style resemble what decision-makers already recognise as excellence?
How much apparently objective scoring rests upon culturally and professionally subjective interpretations?
Does the fact that a process has been followed become sufficient evidence that the outcome must have been fair?
This fifth mechanism may be particularly powerful because the procedure does not merely distribute opportunity.
Once completed, it can also legitimise the distribution it has produced.
“The process was followed” becomes an answer to questions about fairness.
But these are two different propositions:
A process was followed.
The process produced a fair outcome.
The first does not automatically establish the second.
Formal processes matter.
Open advertisement, transparent criteria, appropriately constituted panels, structured interviews, documented decisions and mechanisms for challenging irregularities all provide important safeguards.
But procedural safeguards are the beginning of equitable recruitment, not its endpoint.
Universities also need to examine the informal architecture surrounding recruitment.
Who encouraged whom to apply?
Who already knew the candidates?
Who had previously worked together?
Who helped define the role?
Who determined what experience counted?
Were there genuinely more candidates than opportunities?
Was meaningful comparison possible?
Were candidates provided equivalent opportunities to demonstrate competence?
Were departures from standard interview questions documented and taken into account when scores were allocated?
Could panel members explain the evidence distinguishing a score of 3 from 4 or 5?
How much assessment depended upon subjective concepts such as “fit”, “confidence”, “leadership presence”, “collegiality” or “communication style”?
And importantly:
When somebody raised concerns about the fairness of the process, was the concern examined?
Or was the existence of the process itself used to close down the question?
Perhaps the most important question is:
Would this recruitment system be capable of recognising excellence that does not already resemble the people holding institutional power?
I return to my friend’s statement from 2021:
“They’re not being racist; they’re simply protecting their own!”
Perhaps the most revealing word in that sentence is not racist.
Perhaps it is:
own.
Who becomes “our own” within an institution?
Who remains an outsider?
Who receives the benefit of familiarity?
Who must repeatedly prove themselves?
Who is regarded as a safe pair of hands?
Who is encouraged to progress?
Whose potential is recognised?
Whose difference is valued?
Whose difference becomes deficiency?
And what happens when the outsider begins questioning the processes through which these distinctions are produced?
Protecting “our own” does not necessarily feel unethical.
It can feel like loyalty.
Trust.
Professional networking.
Good judgement.
Risk reduction.
Team fit.
Recruiting somebody whose work we already know.
And defending a decision by saying:
“We followed the process.”
That is precisely why these practices deserve scrutiny.
Systemic unfairness is particularly durable when the behaviours reproducing it feel entirely normal.
In my 2021 article, I argued that the best person for an opportunity might not emerge from our existing professional networks.
We may not initially know, like or trust them.
They may possess skills, expertise and knowledge outside our existing domain of experience.
Five years later, I would go further.
A genuinely equitable university should not merely create formal procedures through which outsiders are permitted to compete with insiders.
It should design recruitment and progression processes so that being an outsider does not itself become an invisible disadvantage.
And it should create cultures in which questioning the fairness of an established process is not automatically interpreted as resistance to the institution or to legitimate authority.
Perhaps, then, we need a more demanding test of recruitment fairness.
Not simply:
Did we follow the process?
But:
Was there meaningful competition?
Were people genuinely given equivalent opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities?
Were familiarity and existing professional relationships recognised as potential sources of advantage?
Could the process challenge the expectations of those already holding power?
And ultimately:
Was the process capable of producing an outcome that the people who designed or controlled it had not already anticipated?
Because if we already know who belongs, already know whom we trust, already recognise what excellence looks like, and sometimes even know who is likely to be appointed, we can continue producing advertisements, Expressions of Interest, shortlists, interview panels, EDI questions and scoring matrices while wondering why inequality within academia remains so stubbornly resistant to change.
Sometimes unfairness does not announce itself as unfairness.
Sometimes it is familiar.
Sometimes it is normalised.
Sometimes all the paperwork is in place.
Sometimes everyone can truthfully say:
“The process was followed.”
And sometimes that is precisely why we need to look more closely at the process.
This article develops ideas first explored in my 2021 essay, Kinship, Cronyism & Others in Private and Public Spaces.
It draws on autoethnographic reflection on my experiences of working within UK higher education.
Examples have been anonymised because the purpose is not to attribute motives or wrongdoing to particular individuals, but to examine how ordinary organisational practices — including familiarity, professional networks, discretionary judgement and procedural legitimation — can contribute to cumulative advantage and disadvantage.
Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil (September 2026)
© 2026 Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil. All rights reserved.
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