Top N papers is already a metric used for professorship slots, so Max or other functions are me simplifying the situation.

I agree though that citations are proxies for goodness and are ultimately poor indications of work. For example, a paper closing the field would have no follow-up work, but a provocative paper would have plenty (regardless of quality).

I think a quantitative metric is necessary because many decisions eventually hit a bean-counter (e.g., admin type), who is not able to assess research quality in the time they have. But even with experts reviewing a set of candidates on research qualifications, the panel would be unable to objectively provide a full ranking of candidates.

A perhaps better way to do it would be to perform proper accounting on research output which stabilizes across a 10-year timeline or so. Each researcher is a “stock” and the stock-price reflects current and projected “revenue”. If someone publishes only papers that go nowhere, their stock tanks. At top institutions, tenure kind of does this (only one time).