If ability in the underlying population is normally distributed, competition for jobs should still leads to people from the right side of the normal distribution ending up in the relevant jobs, and people from the left side of the normal distribution not getting the jobs. If we now measure the performance of people with the jobs, shouldn't we expect the graph to look like the right side of a normal distribution, which looks more like a pareto distribution than an entire normal distribution? 

So surely finding that the performance of employees in a field looks more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution doesn't demonstrate that individual performance at the population level is more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution?