The hiring crisis in frontier fields
We live in an era of rapid scientific and technological change. Organizations working on transformative problems—AI safety, biosecurity, climate adaptation, pandemic preparedness—face an acute crisis: they cannot find the people who can do the work.
The problem is not a shortage of talent. The problem is that our methods for identifying talent are fundamentally broken. A resume tells you what someone claims they did; it does not tell you whether they can solve novel problems under uncertainty, hold productive disagreement in high-stakes situations, or navigate moral complexity with judgment.
Traditional hiring systems optimize for administrative convenience and legal defensibility, not predictive accuracy. They rely on proxies—university pedigree, years of experience, keyword matching—that were never validated against real-world performance, especially in domains that did not exist when the hiring system was designed.
This is not inevitable. We can build a science of capability assessment. We can measure human excellence in ways that are both rigorous and humane. We can create hiring systems that are more accurate, faster, and fairer than anything that exists today.
The Merit Institute exists to do exactly that.