Getting that big promotion is less about how good you are and more about whether your boss remembers you at the exact moment the choice is made.
This paper identifies a 'Recognition-Evaluation Gap' where high-performers are ignored simply because they aren't 'retrievable' during the rapid, biased mental shortcuts managers use. It suggests that at senior levels, being 'rememberable' is a strictly separate gate from being 'good.'
<span><span>The RRR Selection Mechanism: A Structural Account of Recognition Failure at Senior Professional Levels<span> </span></span></span>
SSRN · 6334438
<p>This paper identifies a structural friction in senior professional selection that precedes formal evaluation: the <b>Recognition–Evaluation Gap</b>. Standard professional development frameworks operate under the Evaluation Assumption — the premise that career trajectory is a direct function of merit and that selection failure signals deficiency at the performance layer. This paper argues that the Evaluation Assumption mislocates the governing constraint. Before evaluation is possible, a field