Why A Psychologist Who Hires The People Everyone Else Rejects Says Your Screening Process Is The Problem

Most hiring begins from a posture of deduction. A company opens a role, a pool of candidates assembles, and the organization’s work is to filter—to decide who is in and, by extension, who is out. We call it looking for the right fit, but the grammar of it is exclusionary by design: out of all of you, only one can belong here. The candidate, meanwhile, is asked to perform, to contort themselves into whatever shape the role seems to demand, hoping the costume holds long enough to get hired. It is an adversarial arrangement dressed up as a meritocratic one, and most of us have accepted it as simply the way work works. Gil Winch, however, would like us to reconsider the entire premise.

Winch is a psychologist and organizational consultant who, more than twenty years ago, did something most people only theorize about: he opened a for-profit call center, Call Yachol, staffed almost entirely by the people the labor market had written off—individuals with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, ex-offenders, people who had never held a job in their lives. No donations, no charity framing. Just a business that pays industry-standard wages, reaches full market-rate productivity, is heavily studied, and routinely outperforms teams of so-called able-bodied workers. We invited Winch onto the latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast, and within minutes, he had dismantled a few of my own assumptions.

What holds a workforce together despite its heterogeneous make-up—people with different backgrounds, abilities, and histories? Winch’s answer was one we return to time and time again on our show: organizational culture. For nearly all of human history, he reminded us, we worked within tribes of a few dozen to a couple of hundred people, where everyone was known, everyone was cared for by someone, and everyone was needed because all hands were required on deck. It is only in the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution that we began leaving home to work for strangers who, if we are lucky, regard us as an asset. This word, asset, should unsettle us more than it likely does. We evolved from communal work, and Winch’s wager is that an organization deliberately built to restore that feeling will outperform one that isn’t. He sees it in his team who pick up the litter without being asked, straighten the crooked picture, and come in for the extra hour because the work finally feels like theirs.

The most radical part of the model is where it starts: the screening. If a traditional job interview were a date, Winch observes, the employer would never get a second one—brash, one-sided, all interrogation and no reciprocity. So, he inverted it. At Call Yachol, candidates can bring a friend, a parent, a social worker, or even a dog. The process begins in the cafeteria, where the screeners introduce themselves, answer any questions candidly, and make the candidate coffee. People fill out a form about what they love, because that is when they are most at ease and most themselves. At the end, candidates are asked to rate, on a scale of one to ten, how much of the real them the company got to see; anyone who answers below an eight is invited back to try again. The goal is not to catch people performing well under pressure; it is to remove the pressure so that the actual person can show up.

That distinction reframes what an interview is even for. Conventional screening rewards the best performer—the most convincing thespian in the room—and then prays the audition predicts the job. Winch is after the opposite: the unguarded person, whose strengths only become visible once the cloak and dagger is set down. And the results compound in directions no spreadsheet would forecast. A man too hard of hearing for phone work was redirected into data analysis, where he was able to build solutions that experts had once ruled out—and, for which, he’s been headhunted for years afterward. Diversity, here, is not a moral checkbox; it is an engine for reaching paths the orthodoxy had quietly fenced off.

According to Winch, about 80% of those who turn up for screening don’t pass. Still, they leave knowing why, often with a candid suggestion of where their talents might fit better instead. People are let go; not everyone makes it. The difference is that the apparatus for doing so is engineered to surface what someone can offer rather than confirm what they lack. When it comes to modern hiring that relies heavily on vibes and increasingly more AI filters, overlooked candidates were never really the problem. But rather, perhaps the real culprit is the screens we’ve built to keep them out.

Check out our full conversation with Gil Winch on the latest episode of FROM THE CULTURE here.