[markshuttle]

High school is also a very similar experience for people all over the world, which is not the case for university or work experience. If you are interested in understanding underlying interests, social dynamics and attitudes in a global pool of applications, then you are interested in things which are similar globally even if the connection might not be obvious.

[eventhorizon77]

I think you are mistaken about the relevance of high school. For a lot of people, high school was a traumatic and/or violent experience that they would rather forget. Does making high school "suddenly relevant" put up an artificial barrier-to-entry for candidates that were able to overcome bad experiences in high school and move on to something better? What about candidates who say something like "high school was awful and I got out as quickly as I could"? Maybe you have a bias in hiring toward candidates who are good at "making stuff up that sounds good"?

[markshuttle]

Life after high school is also full of trauma and difficulty. I think one of our problems in society today is that advertising and social media pump out a false narrative of beauty and success which makes people feel like failures just because they are suffering and struggling, when both of those things are the act of living as far as I can see.

How do you deal with adversity? How do you deal with peer pressure? How do you motivate yourself to work on things that feel irrelevant? How do you choose your hobbies and the people you associate with? Those are important things to assess in a potential colleague. And this is just one potential angle on how one might assess them.

As for "making stuff up that sounds good", you are correct, some people are better at that than others. Fortunately we have clear and objective measures of that to work with so forewarned is forearmed.