“Best person for the job” is either a meaningless phrase or a myth, depending on how you choose to define best. In reality, there are many comparably adequate

“Best person for the job” is either a meaningless phrase or a myth, depending on how you choose to define best. In reality, there are many comparably adequate people for getting any job done, and no clairvoyance that lets us know who among them will deliver the best outcome. So we resort to picking among the comparably adequate candidates by either broadening “best” to include non-task factors like culture harmony, diversity of perspective, gut feeling, etc That a bunch of adequate people all came from the same class at the same university is actually pretty plausible, and (subject to tradeoffs) those people will probably even work pretty well as a group because of that shared experience. I’m not saying its the ideal strategy to only hire that way, but just that it’s not nearly so straightforward as you suggest.