Hah! Now you have my curiosity. What do they replace the normal hiring process with? A game of LoL?
So if you're hitting (a verifiable) top 0-0.5% in some field, there's a reasonable bias towards assuming a high general competence.
I did once hit 0.5 percentile in a multinational PHP exam in my teenage years however I did have a second window open with an interpreter running for the most fringe questions. -- who knows what that means.
Case in point I have a friend who is a top 32 magic player in NA. She recently, not even a year ago recently, made it her goal to become a chess grandmaster and she's already 2000 ELO. You could argue that maybe some skills transfer but it's pretty shaky reasoning.
See: https://www.nine.com.au/sport/olympics/olympians-who-changed...
I know a software developer who could well be a concert pianist, for example. Ie., that pool of people who overlap, in that overlap, are probably extraordinarily talented.
Also it smells like a false metric. People who are in the 0.05% of excellence are probably still heavily invested in the thing they're excelling at.
We once interviewed a former national [racket sport] champion from [country] for a React/JS SWE role. Our in-house [racket sport] expert, who happens to be the best player among us, was sure they’d ace the coding exercise. The next day, when we asked for his verdict, he gave us a few words: “He sucks. He got absolutely nowhere.”
Lesson learned: extreme talent in one domain not always a predictor of aptitude in another.
The best grad/intern I have supervised had the least domain knowledge starting out, but was an olympic finalist level swimmer. They were easily the most competent by the end of the graduate rotation.
Unfortunately, they were also annoyingly perky first thing in the morning as they had already been awake and training since 4am.