Scores should inform, never gate

Entra matches every employee against every open role and gives them a score. Once you have a score, the obvious next step is to use it as a gate: below the threshold, the Apply button disappears.

It’s tidy. It saves the staffing team time. And I’m glad we didn’t build it.

Listen to why people are frustrated

Our research had already told us how people felt about the old process. Employees rated finding open roles 2.3 out of 5, and the process as a whole 2.8. Some felt roles were filled before they were ever posted.

People who already feel shut out of a process they can’t see do not need a system that shuts them out more efficiently.

Check what the score is built on

The staffing team gave us the second reason. The skills data behind the score was self-reported, and often out of date. Someone could be a strong fit for a role and still score low because they hadn’t touched their profile in a year.

A gate built on unreliable data doesn’t filter out weak candidates. It filters out people who didn’t update a form.

The rule we wrote

So I made it a binding business rule: the threshold decides who is recommended and surfaced to the staffing team, but Apply is never disabled.

In practice that means:

• Employees see their score, the skills they matched and the gaps, before they apply.
• The staffing team still gets candidates ranked by fit.
• Nobody is filtered out by an out-of-date profile.

Writing it down as a business rule mattered. Rules like this get quietly reversed in a sprint when someone asks “can we just hide the button?”. A written rule, owned by the product owner, survives handovers and new team members.

Name the product after the person

Entra comes from the Latin “entrare”, to enter. We named it after the person’s journey, not the process. That choice and this rule come from the same place: the product exists to open doors, not to guard them.

Where I land

Scores, rankings and recommendations are useful. They help busy teams focus. But when a number decides whether someone is even allowed to try, it stops informing and starts excluding.

Let the data guide the people making decisions. Don’t let it make the decision for them.