Hiring on evidence, not assumptions

Every hiring decision is made on incomplete information. An employer cannot know in advance how a candidate will perform. This is why hiring decisions relies on proxies: a gap in the CV, an age, an injury, a name, skin-colour or a foreign nationality frequently stops people early in the process. Proxies are cheap, and many of them are tragically poor.

A health history is among the poorest. It records what happened to a person, not what that person can do. Yet it often removes candidates before anyone has tested them. They do not even get the interview. The cost falls on both sides. The candidate loses access to work, and the company loses capacity it never gets to see.

Telenor’s Open Mind programme addresses this directly by replacing the proxy with observation. Participants are placed in real roles, with real deadlines and real colleagues, and both sides learn what is actually true. That is a business case, not charity.

I joined the programme after a serious injury that, for a period, took away my balance, coordination and speech. My thinking was left intact. I still lost my job, on assumptions about the consequences of the injury.

Jørgen Christiansen, foto: Martin Fjellanger

Then came Telenor, and for ten months I worked as Director of Public Affairs, involved in the questions that now define the telecommunications industry: the sovereignty, security and resilience of digital infrastructure, and the political arenas where those questions are discussed.

The programme gave me something no rehabilitation can provide: evidence, in a demanding workplace, that I can still do the work. For a senior professional returning to the labour market, that evidence is what references are built on. For Telenor, it meant access to three decades of experience in public affairs, investor relations and issues management.

The interesting question is why more companies do not do the same? The barrier cannot be cost, and it is not complexity, since the model is structured and proven. Maybe the barrier is the assumption itself? A diagnosis feels like information, and so it is allowed to stand in for the evidence that would have contradicted it.

Telenor has run the Open Mind programme since 1996. Other employers do not need to invent anything. They can adopt the model as it is.

Jørgen Christiansen, Director Public Affairs in Telenor ASA and Open Mind participant 2025-2026

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