Job mismatch and early career success (nber.org)

My interpretation based on experience is that the underqualified individuals will often be more prone to volunteering, participation in clubs and committees, and politicking. The overqualified individuals also do this, but will likely be required to do "the real job" more often, leaving a less qualified individual more free to do those things.

Community involvement is a significant factor on both enlisted and officer performance reports. Gotta fill that section in no matter what, and if your section is poor it drags your overall score down.

However, promotion testing is purely knowledge and skill based. A good test taker can overcome the weight of lower performance report scores.

Just my opinion, though.

Not about your specific context, but this contradiction has a name: Dilbert Principle

Reminds me of the Gervais framework that someone made (as a kind of parallel to The Office) where you had three groups, confused, losers, psychopaths (don't read too much into the names). Confused work really hard at things they don't get recognized for (Dwight), psychopaths underperform and get promoted (Ryan).

A Straight Shooter with Upper Management Written All Over Him

Ever seen Office Space?

Well, people that are better evaluated at a job should have a higher chance of staying in that job, no? (Only half joking)

Most of the highly qualified people I know in the military have went reserves or left entirely due to poor leaders or bureaucracy. At ta certain point you can't change the system so you have to change. I'm guessing the ones who stay in that environment get demoralized by not being able to do what they believe is productive/best.

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It's not about the system working or not, it's more about whether it's well calibrated. You'd expect performance to scale linearly with skill (f(skill) = job_quality * x), but the data look more like a sigmoid: overqualified people disengage and never hit their full potential. Underqualified folks aren't that far behind their peers, yet in a better-matched role, they'd perform better with less effort.

I find it kinda sad, honestly. But these are aggregated statistics, I still think people can overcome their perceived limitations, I'm certain some of the underqualified folks are the ones that drag that curve up a lot.

"patterns suggest that overqualified individuals are less motivated, but still outperform others in their same job."

At least they aren't using engagement as a core part of the rating like many companies do - you can outperform on metrics and still be rated low because of your intangible and subjective "engagement".

Perhaps measuring how well people perform on IQ tests?

Total anecdata, but whenever I've had to take an IQ test for an interview process, it's never the IQ test that's used to disqualify me. It's usually something like culture fit.

But these days if a job requires me to do an IQ test to join, I'll use that as a signal to get the fuck out of there and find a different role. So again, anecdata, but I suspect I'm not the only one who would eschew those results.

Military takes the ASVAB which is basically the SAT / IQ Test which qualifies you were certain jobs. For example Nukes in the Navy (which is considered one of the hardest programs for obvious reasons) is 252 score for some combination of scores.

It's exactly what it is. When someone enlists in the US military, they take what is called the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery). It's more specific to the military than Stanford-Binet, but effectively it is still an IQ test. Specific military occupational specialties have minimum score requirements to qualify for that job. Which job you actually end up getting is a combination of scoring high enough to qualify, scoring higher than everyone else who wants the same job, doing well on other things they assess you on, and needs of the branch of service at the time you enlist. Score high enough for cyber but they only need mechanics, then you're becoming a mechanic. Conversely, if they badly need cyber professionals but nobody scores high enough to meet the official bar, they're still putting people into that job. Hence, why the mismatch exists in the first place and why there's a study like this.

My understanding is that IQ tests can measure a type of intelligence, but fixation on its narrow metrics can lead one to overlook other attributes that are just as likely to be relevant, but aren’t something that necessarily shows up in standardized tests. Add to that the fact that IQ tests can be heavily biased, and leave a lot of ambiguity for the proctors to interpret, it’s not a surprise that they’re so controversial.

I personally would be very suspicious if asked to sit for an IQ test as part of a job evaluation. I have worked for places that blindly worship context-free performance metrics, and it was insufferable.