Merit Needs a MESSENGER

Millions of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Hidden among them are masterpieces that may never be watched and mediocre ones that may become the next viral thing. The difference is rarely quality; it is visibility. Every video needs to keep proving its worth each time it is watched; first, however, it must be seen.

Meritocracy, surprisingly, follows a similar logic. While every organisation claims to uphold it, none has the luxury of discovering the merit in everyone. Somewhere between talent and opportunity lies a quiet force bridging the gap: recommendation. Not a substitute, not a guarantee, but simply a messenger.

Why Merit Needs Introducing

We are tempted to think of merit as something obvious and quantifiable, captured through action verbs and numbers. But do they provide evidence of future competence? A résumé cannot reveal resilience, and an interview cannot truly measure judgement. Potential, by definition, is therefore invisible until tested.

And so every organisation confronts the same question: How do you identify merit before it has had the opportunity to prove itself?

A recommendation is often mistaken for preferential treatment or, worse, something closely related to nepotism. But the two are not the same. Nepotism succeeds without performance; a genuine recommendation merely creates the possibility of performance. The distinction is subtle but essential: one closes the doors to everything that follows, while the other simply opens the first door.

A recommendation’s true purpose, however, is something else entirely. It is not a certificate of competence but rather a transfer of credibility from someone who has already earned it. When a manager recommends a colleague or a professor advocates for a student, they are lending their reputation, not their influence — not eliminating merit but reducing uncertainty and helping organisations decide who deserves the opportunity to prove it.

Access Must Earn Accountability

But this function holds only as long as accountability accompanies access. When access becomes immune to accountability, recommendations stop serving merit, cease to be messengers, and become gatekeepers instead.

Every workplace runs on an invisible exchange of advice, introductions, referrals and mentorship. These circulate quietly alongside salaries and KPIs, rarely recorded in any system, yet consistently shaping careers. They constitute an informal economy of opportunity, one that operates in parallel with official processes and, for many people, determines far more about their trajectory than any formal evaluation ever will. Recognising this exchange is not a call to eliminate it, but to make it more deliberate and better understood.

Merit has rarely spoken loudly for itself. It requires someone or something to carry its message before it has the opportunity to speak for itself. Whether that messenger is a social media algorithm, a professor’s letter or a colleague’s referral, the underlying principle remains the same.

Access can only begin the conversation, but merit alone must sustain it.

In the end, messengers should never determine who succeeds. They can and should determine only who gets the chance to prove why they deserve to.