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The French Public employment service has developed a recruitment technique called “recruitment by simulation,” which selects candidates for companies based on practical exercises that simulate the conditions of the job offered. This aptitude test is designed to reduce the weighting given to the résumé and to previous experience, which are seen as arbitrary. This article describes the socioeconomic configuration at the heart of this method of selection, showing that forms of evaluation of the job market by intermediaries can lead to the reimportation of traditional criteria within tests that were designed to demarcate themselves from those criteria.