Why hiring and dating will always be vibes based
Hiring and dating are always frustrating but necessary matching processes we have to participate in. Cursory googling shows that 'matching' problems are a whole field of computer science theory (which I have not studied).
Why do hiring (and dating) end up being 'vibes' based?
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We don't know exactly which skills or traits we want. Especially when it comes to soft skills like communication or sense of agency or grit.
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We don't know exactly which skills or traits we want. This is such a crucial point that it bears repeating.
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There are no standardized, trustworthy tests for said skills or traits. We have no good way to measure agency. What is gritty to you may not be to me. Even if there were, how do we get everyone to trust that I am a 5/10 on communication?
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People lie, and you only find out wayyyyy later that they lied. (It is a separate issue altogether that people have very good incentives to lie.)
Parting thoughts on dating: I believe that nature intended for people-to-people matching processes to BE fuzzy. Fuzziness ensures enough randomness is introduced, which benefits evolution by introducing diversity. Maybe "vibes" are super-distillations of thousands of signals that our brain is receiving and processing from the other person, which are individually hard to describe or even explain but together create an emotion inside us. E.g., what if our brain is subconsciously counting the number of times the other person blinks or measuring the circumference of their thighs as a signal? This approach appears structurally similar to the LLMs of today, where we throw in a bajillion inputs, have no clue what is going on inside the model, have no clue which inputs are important or how important they are, BUT trust the output because it can be somewhat verified.
Parting thoughts on hiring: Hiring managers are risk minimizers. Unless it is truly helpful (say, in a very creative team or a real 0-to-1 team), hiring managers do not want a "wild" candidate for their "unique perspective and ideas." No, hiring managers want Rahul/John/Ahmed from another company's accounting team to come join their accounting team so that nothing breaks and they aren't blamed for it. Butt in the seat > snowflake.