Talent has no title

A candidate's first impression should be their skills. Not their salutation.

I came across something recently, while researching hiring practices for an earlier piece on India's changing job market, that made me stop scrolling. Several recruitment platforms ask candidates to state their salutation, gender, marital status, even sexual orientation before a single line of their experience has been read.

This isn't just a feeling. A field experiment on India's HR hiring market, presented at the Indian Statistical Institute's economics conference, sent out matched, equally qualified applications that differed only in the marital status disclosed. Recruiters responded differently anyway.

Separately, a 2024 Reuters investigation found that hiring agents working for Foxconn in India had been rejecting married women for assembly-line jobs, something the company said it corrected once the practice came to light. Closer to interviews themselves, a study reported by Feminism in India found that 42% of female candidates were asked at least one personal question, against 33% of male candidates, marital status and family background chief among them.

I don't think this is about any single employer. It's a habit baked into how hiring is designed: forms and interview scripts that ask who someone is before what they can do.

And the case for reversing that order is only getting stronger. McKinsey has found that hiring for skills predicts job performance far more reliably than hiring for education or pedigree. LinkedIn's India Future of Recruiting Report found three in four recruiters already see skills-first hiring as where things are headed. India's own labour numbers add weight to this: the Economic Survey 2025–26 recorded female labour force participation climbing from 23.3% in 2017–18 to 41.7% in 2023–24. Real progress. But progress that's still shaped, right at the point of entry, by forms asking for marital status before merit.

What if the first questions on a hiring form were simply:

• What can this person do?
• What have they built?
• What problems have they solved?
• What value could they bring?

Title, marital status, gender, orientation could come later, only where a role genuinely calls for it, well away from the evaluation stage.

For most jobs, these identity fields don't help anyone assess capability. They're there out of habit, not need. And habit, left unquestioned, hardens into bias.

India wants a future-ready, skills-first workforce for an economy being reshaped by technology and new sectors. That ambition needs more than curriculum reform and training infrastructure. It needs hiring systems built around the same intent. A country cannot claim to be building on merit while its recruitment forms still ask who someone is before what they contribute.

This is a small, fixable thing. Employers and platforms can simply reorder their own intake forms. Skills and experience first. Identity fields later, and only where they matter.

Talent has no title. Capability has no marital status. Our hiring systems should already know that.

(Nisha Singh is a policy analyst under MSDE, working at the intersection of skilling, employability and workforce development. Views expressed are her own.)