Stereotypes lead to dumb decisions.

My mom briefed fighter pilots for a living. My older sister was a Lieutenant in the fire department. My little sister did multiple tours of duty in the Middle East.

No surprise, then, that some of the toughest people I know are women.

The most lethal person I know from martial arts training is an unassuming and skinny introvert.

The most successful political fundraiser at a large, conservative organization is a Latino immigrant.

Several of the top ten selling rap albums are from white guys.

A millionaire private equity investor once picked me from an airport in his old, beat up Ford Explorer.

These aren’t outliers. They’re representative of the fact that, as Florida Georgia Line reminds us, “People Are Different.”

Stereotyping comes naturally for us as a species. We used our brains to outwit faster and stronger predators. Stereotyping allowed our ancestors to quickly assess whether something was a potential threat. It was a rudimentary version of probability for the sake of survival — and it worked rather well for that purpose.

This makes stereotyping perfectly fine if you’re trying to determine whether that stray dog is friendly or not. But if you are running a business, it’s not a terribly smart way of making decisions.

The Caliber of Your Team Determines the Caliber of Your Business

It stands to reason that you need great people to build a great business. Your people are responsible for developing the product or service, marketing it, selling it, supporting it, and improving it. If you snatch up the best players in the game, chances are significantly better, and you’ll field a better team (unless you are the owner of the Dallas Cowboys).

When it comes to recruiting the best people, it stands to reason that you are looking for the best people for a particular job. If you are assessing someone using broad stereotypes, or anything other than their individual capability to perform that specific role, you have a flawed decision making model.

I’m not just talking about promoting diversity or allowing equal opportunity for protected classes here, either. Yes, you are most certainly using a flawed (and illegal) decision making model if you are assessing the potential of someone’s performance based on skin color, gender, sexuality, or any other protected class. But that is a symptom of the underlying problem.

The real problem is in using broad stereotypes of any kind, or anything other than an individual’s potential for performance to determine the probability of someone being a high performer in your organization.

What do I mean?

How About Those Prestigious Schools?

The college someone attended, if they attended college, may be an indication of the potential learning they could have absorbed while attending, but it’s not a good indication of whether actually learned anything or not.

Case in point: I forked out $125k+ for my MBA and graduated with about 80 other talented people. But everyone I graduated with didn’t invest the same level of effort, pay attention in the same classes, or leave with the same knowledge about the same things. Some of us can build financial models from the ground up while others would look at you cross eyed if you asked them to analyze a company’s books.

If you think a degree from a particular school means someone has a particular level of knowledge, let me assure you, it does not. Having worked with undergrads from schools people may not even recognize that can run circles around Harvard MBAs I’ve worked with in more subjects than one, and I’ve learned to dig deeper than the school’s name.

If you want to use education level, or even school selection as a criterion to narrow down a large pool of candidates, great. Supplement that process by identifying the specific skills you think that degree and school selection represent, then develop a test to validate capabilities in the interview process if you want to find the best people.

What About Business Model Experience?

If I see “x years of SaaS sales experience required” one more time…

It’s entirely understandable if you want to recruit someone with industry knowledge, technical expertise, or a network of relationships you can leverage to accelerate the success curve of newly hired people on your team.

But your business model almost certainly has nothing to do with the likelihood of success. Yes, that applies to nonprofits and SaaS businesses. This is a criterion that is almost never relevant.

Want a sales rep that has sold for other nonprofits? Why not grab a SaaS sales unicorn to not only come wreck shop but also bring a new approach to your tools and tech? Want a sales rep that has sold for other SaaS companies before? Why not grab a badass fundraiser from a nonprofit or political organization that can introduce sales fundamentals that can only be developed by raising money for, well, basically nothing in return?

But, Millennials Are the Worst, Right?

HR organizations, workshops, training, and workforce solution products are flying off the shelves to better attract and support millennials like they were all born out of the same womb (which still wouldn’t ensure uniformity).

Basing your recruiting, strategy, leadership, or management around how you believe an entire age group acts really isn’t any smarter than saying, “We need a single program for all these old fogies.”

It makes no difference to me if you are stereotyping young, spoiled, lazy, and short-attention-span young people or ancient, out-of-touch old-timers, the decision-making model is flawed.

All the people born within the same decade-long time span behave about as similarly to one another as entire genders act homogeneously.

Categorizing age groups is fundamentally as flawed as categorizing any other group of people together. Yes, the workforce is changing, and demands on employers to make higher investments in people’s well-being are increasing. That’s not because of those “damn Millennials” or “Gen Z” employees joining the workforce. It’s a continuation of a trend that has been going on for a very, very long time. Thanks to old people who started that process for us to continue advancing.

People Are Different

Herein lies the point I want to make: Stereotypes are lazy decision making models.

Fairness, morals, and legal issues aside, the smartest companies on the planet —those competing for the smartest and best among us — already understand this.

Airbnb, Netflix, McKinsey, Google, Facebook, and others are legal entities, not people (buzz off Supreme Court). They don’t think for themselves, or have a particular moral conviction that leads them to support Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ issues. They are companies that understand their success depends on their ability to attract and retain the best people on the planet. They’re smart enough to know those people come in very diverse packages, so having a policy of diversity through-and-through helps them achieve their goals.

It also happens to be on the right side of the issues from a social and fairness standpoint.

While these companies may use different pieces of criteria to help filter through millions of applications, they also have the most difficult interview processes on the planet…

They are looking for the best person.

Are you?