Uncovering Blind Spots in Leadership Hiring

Norlandia Health & Care Group (NHC) provides essential services across kindergartens, healthcare institutions, and asylum reception centers. With over 22,000 employees, HR and recruitment face a critical responsibility: hiring the right managers to lead and support the teams caring for children, patients, and asylum seekers. Because internal surveys confirm that leadership is an extremely important factor in working environment and employee well-being, Head of HR and Administration Marie Wingestad and her team needed a reliable way to look past a candidate's "best behavior" and identify potential risks before they step into a leadership role.

To meet this high-stakes challenge, NHC started to implement a best-practice talent acquisition program built on evidence-based methods, including ability tests, personality assessments, and structured interviews. Crucially, to address the risk of destructive leadership, NHC became an early adopter of Fairsight's Blind Spots questionnaire. This tool helps them identify traits that might derail a leader under pressure – traits that traditional interviews often miss.

"Blind Spots helps us weed out candidates who shouldn’t be leaders in the first place, helping us avoid potential problems before they start," Wingestad explains. "It makes the process structured, fair, and professional."

NHC is now expanding these structured assessment methods to more roles where trust and risk management are crucial, empowering local hiring managers to make better, fairer decisions. Fairsight’s tools have also become a core part of NHC’s internal leadership development program. Reflecting on the transformation, Wingestad notes: “I think its difficult to act fairly without structure, because of our known and unknown biases. Fairsights solution helps us compare candidates on fair metrics. This gives us more confidence in the process and the candidates trust the process more.”