Unanswered is not zero

Two sentences that are not the same

“We could not find out whether she has led a team” and “she has not led a team” are different sentences. The first is a fact about our information. The second is a fact about the candidate. They have almost nothing in common, and a scoring system that treats them as one thing quietly rejects good people for the sin of having a thin public profile.

The confusion is easy to miss because it never announces itself. Nobody sees a rejection that says “insufficient information”. They see a candidate sitting lower on the list than the others, for no stated reason, and they work down from the top.

A thin profile is not a thin career. It is an engineer who has never written much about herself, someone working in a market where a detailed public profile is not the norm, a person whose page has not been touched in four years because they have been busy doing the job. Scoring silence as a negative selects against all of them at once, and none of it has anything to do with whether they can do the work.

Unknown is recorded as unknown

When something about a candidate could not be established, it is recorded as unknown. It is not scored as though the answer were no. The absence goes into the record as an absence, which means it can be read, questioned and closed later, rather than being converted into a verdict nobody chose to make.

None of this makes an unknown harmless. A requirement nobody can answer is a real gap in what you know, and it should feel like one. The point is that it is a gap in the file rather than a strike against the person, and those two things lead to different next actions.

A candidate we could not enrich stays provisional

Sometimes the shortfall is not one requirement but the whole profile. The details could not be enriched, and what is left is a name, a title and very little else. That candidate stays provisional rather than being handed a confident score built on almost nothing.

The temptation to score anyway is worth naming, because it is strong. A shortlist where every row carries a number looks finished. A shortlist with provisional rows on it looks like work still to do, which is exactly what it is, and it is the only one of the two that tells you the truth.

A missing answer is a fact about our information, not a fact about the candidate.

The score carries its own coverage

A score on its own hides how much sits behind it. So the score carries which dimensions were actually answered: a high score backed by two answered dimensions is a different object from a high score backed by nine, and you can tell them apart before you decide which one to act on.

That is the practical shift. Coverage becomes something you can see and act on, instead of an invisible haircut applied to half your shortlist. A well-covered candidate at a slightly lower score is often the safer call than a sparsely covered candidate above her, and you are now in a position to make that call rather than to inherit it.

It also changes what a weak line means. A genuine no is a reason to stop. An unknown is a reason to ask, which costs one question in a screening call and regularly turns a mid-table candidate into the person you hire.

What this changes for your week

• Quiet profiles stop dropping off the bottom of the list. People who do not write about themselves are no longer penalised for it without anyone deciding to penalise them.
• You can see which candidates you actually know something about. Coverage sits alongside the score rather than behind it.
• Screening questions come from somewhere. The unknowns on a candidate are the list of things worth asking, and they are already written down.

How to use it

1. Read coverage before you read the ranking. Two candidates on similar scores can be carrying very different amounts of evidence, and that difference usually matters more than the gap between the scores.
2. Treat a provisional candidate as unfinished rather than weak. The honest question is whether it is worth finding out more about this person, not whether they are worse than the row above.
3. Take the unknowns into the screening call as questions. An unknown that survives a conversation has become a real answer, in either direction, and the record improves either way.