Justifying employee gatekeeping: A video-elicitation and comparative study on resolving the moral unease of hiring

Abstract

Hiring is an act of evaluation that comes with much organizational and social responsibility, making it a morally sensitive situation. The way employee gatekeepers come to terms with their selections presents itself as an exemplary case to study the moral dimension of organizational life. Relying on a pragmatist perspective and an economies of worth framework, this article uncovers how employers experience moral uncertainty and justify their choices. Through a comparison of gatekeeping in two employment fields, this study covers new ground on how decision logics and regimes of valuation play out and can be structurally conditioned. Through in-depth interviews, combined with a ranking exercise based on video-elicitation, with recruiters and hiring managers from the corporate (n: 23) and cultural (n: 17) fields in the Netherlands, this paper explores how evaluation processes and selections are justified. The interviews show that a sense of moral unease is common among gatekeepers, but much more prevalent among corporate rather than cultural gatekeepers. Larger organizational size, high market pressure and lower supply of candidates does not translate into moral sterility for corporate gatekeepers. Second, the study reveals that a connexionist logic enters as a powerful justificatory regime, transforming candidate selection procedures into test of confession.