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The sky is the limit for young talent, thanks to this leading Airline.

LATAM Airlines Group engages young professionals by inviting them to show off business intelligence and a passion for travel.

This is not a job posting for LATAM Airlines Group, but an example of a leading multinational adopting a different digital approach to spotting top talent. LATAM Airlines does not label young talent by the university they attended, or their social class.

While most companies claim to be non-discriminatory, let’s face it. CVs are rarely filtered without a heavy bias towards certain Universities, Academic Grades, High Schools, Genders, Social classes, Second names, Nationalities and Skill labels.
If, at this point, you disagree with me on the existence of such discriminatory practices in hiring then I strongly suggest that you read another post .

I would like to reason rationally, not emotionally, for giving young people a fair and merit-based chance to a job; without ANY of the above discriminations. This is the only way we can build work places of the future with the brightest young minds.

Organisations can very well seek young professionals who demonstrate both, performance and passion, by a fair assessment which does not label them. I also strongly believe that there is no excuse to continue the way we have been hiring talent. If the CV is your first filter for selecting applicants, you are discriminating.

Skills are Out, Performance is In

The problem I have with the application process built into most hiring processes today is the idea of matching skills listed on a resume to those listed on a job description. To game the system and garner an interview, candidates are now adding skills that they don’t have. Companies then add more skills and more requirements as countermeasures. This becomes a never ending battle, with everyone losing, especially those actually qualified. As far as I’m concerned, we don’t have a skills gap we have a thinking gap, and adding more skills to narrow it, only widens it. Defining work as a series of skills implies everyone with the skills is competent and those without them, or possessing a different mix, aren’t. Not only is the logic flawed, it describes the current problem in a nutshell. - Lou Adler

Now, young people can show LATAM Airlines group their performance and passion for travel by answering these questions:

You’ve been recently hired to work at LATAM Airlines and your duty is to set prices for the route flying between cities AAA and BBB. Is it possible to capture all of the corporate and tourist demand on planes with only economy class seats?

A new employee suggested an auction – or last minute sale – should be made on seats in order to sell them to the best buyer. Do you agree with the statement? What would be the short/long term impacts of deploying this procedure?

Your job is to maximize the airline’s annual profit with a $150 million budget. How many aircraft of each type should be bought in order to maximize annual profit?

The real innovation by LATAM Airlines Group is that it is using these questions to spot top talent by merit rather than conventional CV biases. Since the quality of answers to these questions acts as the first criteria for selection, it gives the youth a fair and unbiased shot at demonstrating their performance and passion for the job. See how the job post even encourages participation from widest possible audience and creates a level playing field for all.

The sky is literally the limit for young talent seeking to join LATAM Airlines Group.

If you know of other scalable and digital examples in which organisations engage with talent to give them equal and merit-based opportunity please share them with me @floatr.