  I study how organizations assign tasks to identify the best candidate to
promote among a pool of workers. Task allocation and workers' motivation
interact through the organization's promotion decisions. The organization
designs the workers' careers to both screen and develop talent. When only
non-routine tasks are informative about a worker's type and non-routine tasks
are scarce, the organization's preferred promotion system is an index contest.
Each worker is assigned a number that depends only on his own type. The
principal delegates the non-routine task to the worker whose current index is
the highest and promotes the first worker whose type exceeds a threshold. Each
worker's threshold is independent of the other workers' types. Competition is
mediated by the allocation of tasks: who gets the opportunity to prove
themselves is a determinant factor in promotions. Finally, features of the
optimal promotion contest rationalize the prevalence of fast-track promotion,
the role of seniority, or when a group of workers is systemically advantaged.
