In auditoriums and boardrooms, a quiet transformation is reshaping how people enter working life — jobs are becoming prizes, and hiring has taken on the grammar of performance and spectacle. Companies like L'Oreal have drawn hundreds of thousands of young hopefuls into talent-show-style competitions, promising that merit, creativity, and nerve will be rewarded with employment. The debate this raises is ancient in new clothing: whether the arenas we build to find talent are truly open, or whether they simply favor those already equipped to perform in them.