Editor’s Note: This is the fourth article in a seven-part GrowthBits series on AI in HR, exploring how leaders can preserve human judgment and embed AI responsibly as work evolves.

The assessment problem is a problem of finding people who have the four capacities.

An Emerging Challenge: What Are We Actually Evaluating?

Evaluating critical thinking potential is one of the places HR professionals have the most intuition and the least defensible methodology. We know it when we see it. Someone has ‘it’ or they don’t…but we struggle to explain “it” to a hiring manager, a candidate, or a lawyer.

AI can make this harder. As AI tools improve, candidates can produce polished written responses, thoughtful interview prep, and structured case analyses with AI assistance. The question of what a candidate can do—as opposed to what they can produce with AI help—is becoming harder to answer. The assessment problem is coming for every hiring process.

Three Principles from an Unexpected Source

One way to think about this problem is through assessment design: what kind of environment reveals how someone responds to ambiguity, changing conditions or flawed assumptions?

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is not, primarily, about war.1 It is about the problem of identifying a particular kind of mind—one capable of thinking in ways that have never been thought before, under radical uncertainty, against adversaries who don’t fight by known rules. The novel’s solution constitutes, embedded in a science fiction narrative, the most sophisticated assessment philosophy available.

PrincipleWhat it Means for Your Hiring Process
Never tell them it’s a testThe moment a candidate knows they are being formally assessed, they shift from being themselves to performing a version of themselves optimized for the evaluator. Construct situations (real problems, working sessions, in-role scenarios) where natural responses reveal who the candidate actually is.
Watch how they loseThe most revealing moments are not victories, but rather moments when the situation is seemingly impossible. Watch what a candidate does when the right answer isn’t available, when the parameters shift mid-problem, when the game has been rigged. The response reveals far more about a mind than any success does.
Reward premise rejectionThe candidate who rejects the framework rather than working within it is marked down in most assessment processes. If you are assessing for creative critical thinking, you need evaluators to recognize premise rejection and the instinct to challenge assumptions as excellence rather than insubordination.

The Deeper Lesson: The War You’re Actually Fighting (Warning, Spoilers Ahead)

The International Fleet in Ender’s Game built a flawless system. It found the most extraordinary military mind of its generation, optimized for a specific war against a specific enemy. Ender won the war for the IF and discovered the enemy had already decided to stop fighting—that the species he destroyed had been trying, in the years before the attack, to communicate a desire for peace. The Fleet’s threat model was out of date. The system was perfect, but it was pointed at the wrong target.

Organizations do this constantly. Hiring processes built around the profile of successful people from the last competitive era. Assessment infrastructure identifying candidates who would have thrived three years ago. The question you want your next great hire to be unable to stop asking: what game is actually being played here?

Current AI assessment tools are well-suited to identifying structured problem-solving. They are poor at identifying the Ender move: the response that rejects the premise, inverts the problem, or finds a solution in the space the tool was never trained to recognize as valid. (The research on this is developing: Bujold et al. (2024)2 and Mori et al. (2025)3 both document systemic gaps in AI hiring tools’ ability to capture unstructured cognitive flexibility; what the tools optimize for tends to be proxies of past performance rather than indicators of novel thinking.) The most elegant assessment system in the world when optimized for the wrong question, finds you the wrong person—brilliantly.

If traditional hiring signals are changing, what human capabilities should organizations prioritize and develop for?

 

Up Next: What Capabilities Become More Valuable as AI Improves and How Leaders Can Build for Them

 

References

  1. Card, Orson Scott, Ender’s Game, Tor Books, 1985, https://torpublishinggroup.com/enders-game/?format=hardback&isbn=9780765394866

  2. Bujold, Antoine, et al., “Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Human Resources Management: A Review of the Empirical Literature,” AI and Ethics, Springer, 2024, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-023-00325-1

  3. Mori, Daniele, et al., “A Systematic Literature Review on Artificial Intelligence in Recruiting and Selection: A Matter of Ethics,” Personnel Review, 2025, https://www.emerald.com/pr/article/54/3/854/1243749/A-systematic-literature-review-on-artificial