[lomnakkus]

There's a lot of interesting research on "judging character". I particularly recall reading in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Kahneman) that subjective judgement was consistently worse than even relatively arbitrary objective judgements. I believe this study was conducted in army recruitment and so obviously may not be universal. Very thought-provoking notetheless.

EDIT: ... that's not to cast any aspersions on any particular people involved here, I'm just trying to make a general point that "intuition" or "judgment" may not actually be as good as we think they are.

[sighype]

The vibe I get is that it isn't character they're really trying to judge. They're really trying to calculate whether a person is palatable to downstream players. I think there's likely some market risk associated with various personalities and they need to address it somehow even if there's no quantitative approach.

A wild experiment would be to test their judgment system by planting a few charming serial killers in their "character judgment" sample pool. My hypothesis is that the charming serial killers would pass at a higher rate.