There’s been a lot of snark about the recent court decision that says being too smart is a reason to NOT hire someone.  Apparently, Robert Jordan is too smart to be a policeman.  (Read about it here. ^[1])

On the  one hand, there’s nothing surprising here.  The idea of being overqualified for a job is old hat.  The logic is that the person will get bored, start bucking for a promotion, or quit as soon as something better comes along.  When a hiring manager extends an offer, they’ll want to know that the person is going to stick around and do the job happily.  Turnover is expensive and disruptive. Our analysis is that for call center workers, the cost of someone leaving is easily thousands of dollars.

Additionally, using assessments to predict performance has been shown again and again, by Evolv and others, to be far more accurate than interviews. You want the best workforce, don’t you?

So, as someone who has seen how effective these tests can be at building a better workforce, I’d normally be all in favor of this.

But I’m not.

The problem is that for most jobs, there are different paths for management and the rank and file.  It’s highly unlikely that someone working the phones in the call center or doing the night shift at a gas station is actually on a career path to become the CEO.

In police work, it’s the opposite.  Even the Police Commissioner of New York started as a beat cop.  Same with the Chiefs of Police in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas . . . . You get the picture.  By capping the IQ of the people at the bottom, “because they’ll get bored,” they’re deciding to cap the IQ of the people at the top, because you have to have experience to get there.   I don’t know much about police work and managing police forces.  But I’d guess that being smarter would be better for managing a department.

The solution might be to do what a lot of large employers do to attract the best and the brightest: have management rotation programs.  Tell would be cops that if they want to be on a management track, they need to do rotations around the department for several years. This way, you’ll get smart, motivated people looking at all different aspects of police work.  And you’ll be able to hire people who score high on IQ tests.

In the meantime, hopefully those managing police screening will think about the implications of screening out smart people.   That is, if they’re smart enough.