There is a moment in every job interview when the conversation stops being about the candidate and starts being about the interviewer's filing system. You can feel it happen. The questions shift from what can you do to what box can we put you in. The candidate ceases to be a person and becomes a data point—a credential, a demographic, a diagnosis, a keyword match against an invisible rubric that was finalised before anyone shook hands.
Janet Albrechtsen, writing in The Australian this week, offered a particularly sharp illustration. A hypothetical senior public servant—decades of experience, a CV that could furnish a small library—interviews for a role at the National Mental Health Commission. He is asked about his "lived experience." He talks about his career. Wrong answer. He talks about his life—fatherhood, community, loss. Wrong again. What the panel wants is a diagnosis. A mental health condition, disclosed to strangers, as a condition precedent to employment. Without it, the filing system has no slot for him.
Albrechtsen's target is the "lived experience" workforce now embedded, and often mandated, across Australian mental health bodies. It is a fair target, and she hits it squarely. But the problem she identifies is not confined to mental health, nor to the public service, nor even to the peculiar enthusiasm with which Australian governments have embraced identity as a professional qualification. The problem is more general and more stubborn.
The Proxy Problem
Hiring is difficult. Genuinely assessing whether the person sitting across from you can do a job—and do it well, under pressure, over time—requires judgement, attention, and a willingness to be surprised. Most interviewers would rather not bother. Proxies are easier.
A proxy is anything that stands in for direct assessment of competence. Some proxies are defensible: a medical degree is a reasonable precondition for practising medicine. A commercial pilot's licence is not mere credentialism. But the further a proxy drifts from third party accessible sense data about a capability, the more it functions as a sorting mechanism for the interviewer's convenience rather than the organisation's benefit.
"Lived experience" is one such proxy. "Culture fit" is another—that magnificent piece of corporate cant that permits an interviewer to reject a candidate on grounds of vibes. So too are the algorithmic keyword filters that bin a CV before a human being ever reads it, the preference for candidates from a narrow band of prior experience, the quiet conviction that someone who "presents well"—which is to say, someone who resembles the interviewer—must be the stronger candidate.
Each of these proxies shares a common defect: they substitute category membership for individual assessment. They answer the question what kind of person is this rather than what can this person do. And they do so with the quiet confidence of a system that has mistaken its own administrative tidiness for rigour.
The Interview that Isn't
The deeper pathology is that many interviews are not interviews at all. They are confirmation exercises. The decision has been substantially made before the candidate sits down—made on the basis of the CV screen, the referral source, the proxy criteria embedded in the position description. The interview exists to ratify that decision, not to test it.
This is why so many interview questions are performative rather than diagnostic. "Tell us about a time you demonstrated leadership in a complex stakeholder environment" is not a question designed to learn something. It is a question designed to let the candidate perform fluency in a particular dialect of corporate language. The interviewer is not listening for substance; they are listening for the right vocabulary. The candidate who says "I sorted out a mess between three departments who wouldn't talk to each other" is giving a better answer than the candidate who delivers a flawless STAR-method response—but only the latter will score well on the rubric.
The "lived experience" requirement is simply the most brazen version of this tendency. It dispenses with the pretence of assessment altogether. You either belong to the category or you don't. The person—their intellect, their judgement, their capacity to deliver outcomes for the people the organisation is supposed to serve—is irrelevant. The politics of the filing system is satisfied, and that is what matters.
Who Pays
The cost of proxy-based hiring is not borne by the interviewers. It is not borne by the HR departments who are too often pushed to prioritise defensibility over discernment. It is borne by the organisations that end up with the wrong people in the wrong roles, and ultimately by the people those organisations are supposed to serve.
In mental health the cost is measured in lives. As the Australian Government Productivity Commission noted:
policies and services meant to improve mental health and prevent deaths by suicide often fall short. The consequences of these failures are well known but still shocking – each year, about 3,000 lives are lost to suicide; and one in five Australians, including one in seven children, experience mental illness. The economic costs are also substantial. The effects of mental ill health and suicide cost Australia over $200 billion a year, through lost productivity and reduced life expectancy, as well as what people and governments spend on mental health and suicide prevention services.
— Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement Review
But the cost is equally real, if less dramatic, in every organisation that hires by proxy. The technology company that filters for "top-tier university" misses the autodidact who would have been its best engineer. The consultancy that hires for "big-four experience" builds a monoculture that cannot see its own blind spots. The government department that weights "lived experience" above operational skill gets a workforce that is, in the most literal sense, unfit for purpose.
The Person, not the Category
None of this is an argument against diversity, or against listening to people whose experience differs from the institutional norm. Lived experience of a system's failures can be genuinely illuminating—provided it is treated as one input among many, not as a trump card that overrides all others. The problem is not that organisations seek diverse perspectives. The problem is that they have confused demographic category with individual perspective, and individual perspective with professional competence.
The remedy is unsexy and difficult, which is why it is so rarely attempted. It requires interviewers to do the thing they are nominally employed to do: assess the person in front of them. Not the CV. Not the category. Not the keyword match. The person. Their reasoning, their judgement, their capacity to do the actual work. This demands interviewers who themselves possess judgement—who can distinguish substance from performance, competence from credential, and genuine insight from the recitation of approved vocabulary.
It also requires a measure of institutional courage. Proxy-based hiring is, above all, safe. It is defensible. When the appointment goes wrong, no one can say the process was flawed—the candidate met every criterion on the checklist. That the checklist was measuring the wrong things is a problem for another day, another review, another restructure. The file is in order. The system is satisfied.
The person who needed help, of course, is not satisfied. But they were never part of the filing system to begin with.
Good night, and good luck.
