A reflection on the talent chain
An uncomfortable question is starting to echo loudly in company hallways, recruitment offices, and conversations among professionals:
“Are we truly hiring the best, or simply those who manage to clear a bar that has been steadily lowered for years?”
This is not about a temporary shortage of technical profiles, but about a systemic erosion of emerging talent—a reality in which excellence is no longer the goal, and we settle instead for those who merely “meet the minimum.”
To understand how we reached this point, we must look at the full sequence of human development. Education, personal growth, socialization, and academic rigor are not isolated compartments but links in a single chain that ends in the workplace.
Education should not be reduced to transferring knowledge; its fundamental mission is to shape the individual—giving them critical thinking and the reasoning skills necessary to model complex situations.
In the real world, problems may look identical at first glance, but only a well-structured mind can perceive the nuances that determine success or failure.
Shifting the problem instead of solving it
Today’s educational discourse, often well-intentioned but devastating in practice, rests on a false premise: that lowering the bar facilitates inclusion. Yet reality shows that reducing expectations at each stage does not remove the obstacle; it merely shifts it to the next.
A student who carries severe reading comprehension gaps will not see them magically disappear upon entering university. Likewise, a teenager who has never been pushed beyond the minimum effort will not suddenly transform into a disciplined, proactive adult overnight.
“It is concerning to encounter flat academic records, stuck in a perpetual ‘five out of ten'”
Historically, education helped us identify where we excelled, as it is natural to have more affinity for some disciplines than others. An academic performance so uniformly monolithic is not plausible.
A homogeneous mediocrity is not a neutral scenario—it is a symptom of a system that has stopped cultivating genuine curiosity and individual strengths.
The digitalization of distraction and the collapse of responsibility
The arrival of technology in the classroom was sold as a modern utopia, but it coincided with something far more powerful: the digitalization of social life outside school. Both forces advanced in parallel, instead of one acting as a counterbalance to the other.
As educational resources migrated to screens, reading and reasoning indicators declined globally. Only those countries that implemented safeguards, rules, and clear limits—recognizing that technology is a tool, not a substitute for cognitive effort—managed to resist the trend.
This shift has also reshaped family responsibility. It is telling that some Business Schools have had to post signs prohibiting meetings with parents. Two decades ago, a student’s poor performance was addressed directly with the student; it was he or she who was asked to provide explanations.
Today, that responsibility has shifted toward the academic environment: professors, tutors, and administrators are increasingly held accountable, in a gradual move away from individual accountability toward a service-oriented logic in which the student ceases to be an active agent and, in many cases, becomes a client.
This form of overprotection merely entrenches the underlying problem, passing it intact to the final link in the chain.
The company as the final link: where you can no longer “send the dish back to the kitchen”
“We’re genuinely struggling to hire talent.”
A friend and supplier told me this recently. He wasn’t referring to senior, highly specialized roles, but to the difficulty of finding raw material with potential.
Latent talent exists, but for it to flourish, it requires a foundational structure that is missing in many candidates today:
- the ability to concentrate
- a coherent mental framework, or how to build and work through one’s rationale
- and personal judgment
At this stage, companies face a compromised position. Unlike earlier educational phases, the labor market cannot look away or “return the dish to the kitchen” as if we were in a restaurant.
“Organizations can train people in hard skills, internal processes, and methodologies, but they cannot compensate for fundamental deficits that should have been developed in childhood.”
Training critical thinking or analytical capacity at twenty-five is a monumental task that severely limits a person’s trajectory—precisely when the market begins demanding more than mere execution.
Toward a future of “getting things done through others”: the urgency of critical thinking
A time comes when companies no longer pay us only to do, but increasingly to get others to do. And that is the opposite of commanding or issuing orders. It has nothing—and should have nothing—to do with that.
Evaluating, anticipating, deciding, prioritizing, and coordinating require a type of reasoning that cannot be improvised. If the talent chain continues lowering the bar at every stage, we risk realizing too late that the problem was never in the last piece of the machinery, but in the first.
Perhaps, at the end of this path, we will discover that we are no longer hiring the best available—or even the good ones. Perhaps we are reaching the point where we simply accept the “least bad,” forgetting that mediocrity has never been, and will never be, a sustainable strategy for the future.
It is absolutely essential that these suppositions do not become true.
