In 1968, sociologist Robert Merton described a pattern that he termed the Matthew effect—named after the verse in the Gospel: "for unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance." Merton studied science and noticed something strange: if two researchers made a discovery around the same time, the recognition went almost entirely to the more famous one. Furthermore, the gap only widened from there—fame brought invitations, grants, co-authorships, and those brought even more fame.
The key to the mechanism: the initial advantage doesn't have to be large. It just has to be first. Afterward, the system amplifies it on its own.
In a career, this works almost literally. A young employee lands on a successful project—not necessarily because they were better than the rest, but often simply because they happened to be available at the right moment. The project takes off. Next, a cascade kicks in: they are noticed, given the next prominent task, gain more complex experience than their peers, grow faster, get into the talent pool, and gain access to stronger leaders. Five years later, the difference in competencies between them and a colleague who started from the same point is now real—not illusory. But it arose not from an initial difference in abilities, but from the difference in that first assignment.
The unpleasant part is that in hindsight, all of this looks like pure meritocracy. The gap by the fifth year is real and measurable. The company sees confirmation: we correctly identified the talent. Checking an alternative history—what would have happened if another person had been placed on that project—is impossible, and no one tries.
Hence the practical problem for HR: mechanisms designed to identify talent easily turn into machines that amplify accidental early differences. Talent pools, high potential programs, and the allocation of visible projects can all equally discover capable people or simply cement those who got lucky at the start.
What helps:
consciously rotating access to "visible" tasks instead of assigning them based on accumulated track records—otherwise, the track record becomes self-fulfilling;
when selecting for the talent pool, asking not only "what are the results?", but also "what opportunities did the person have to achieve these results?";
and regularly checking whether the high potential pool suspiciously aligns with the list of those who landed successful projects in their first two years.