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| ▲ | spydum 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I have never heard of IQ tests for hiring, is this for real? I've seen Myers-Briggs and similar personality sorting hats, but never IQ. | | |
| ▲ | golly_ned 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Amazon did this, at least for a time, as part of a "No See, No Hear" hiring pilot program. The purpose was to see if they could hire university graduates with a minimum of human interviewing effort. They selected from a handful of universities, gave a couple online tests, verified the candidate's identity as the test-taker, then would give out offers sight-unseen. I was hired this way in 2015. From my perspective, I had taken a couple online tests, then months later had a thirty-minute identity verification call, then a couple months later, was sent a job offer. I thought it was by mistake, so I didn't ask too many questions. I had a thirty-minute call with a hiring manager I otherwise never interacted with, then accepted, flew internationally back to the states to Seattle to start, met him and all my teammates for the first time on my first day of work. I found the internal documents about this program later on spelunking in the internal wiki. | | |
| ▲ | Leherenn 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Do you know what happened with the program and people hired this way? Was it generally successful? | |
| ▲ | spydum 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | that is wild! I could certainly see this as an attempt to eliminate hiring bias maybe? that was super popular in that time frame, but never heard anybody taking it that far. | | |
| ▲ | anal_reactor 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's funny how people pushed hard for removing hiring bias until they realized that this meant that you'd get even more people from unfavorable social groups. Anyway, looking from today's perspective, this seems like an obvious attempt at automating the hiring process itself in order to fold the HR department. If only back then they had today's AI technology. |
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| ▲ | mkipper 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I applied for a management-consulting-ish job a decade ago (I was desperate!) at a big firm and had to take what was basically an IQ test. I have no idea if the test literally calculated my IQ, but the questions were exactly the questions you'd see in an IQ test (e.g. next item in some geometric sequence) so it may as well have. This was in a group interview for recent university graduates at a very big company. I assume their hiring process was pretty standardized, so there were probably thousands of people taking this test every year in North America. | |
| ▲ | toast0 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | General IQ tests probably aren't legal in the US; Griggs v Duke Power Co [1] says (more or less) that employment tests have to be job related if the results of the test have disparate impact on protected classes of people. It's hard to argue that a general IQ test is job related, but they're likely to have a disparate impact on protected classes of people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 3 days ago | parent [-] | | This is a weird pernicious Internet myth. It obviously can't be true, because there's a big, well-known company that delivers these tests for employment/recruiting settings and they have a logo crawl on their page that include several giant companies. If those tests were illegal, employment lawyers would be making bank off it. | | |
| ▲ | ozb 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm not an expert/lawyer, but this does seem to indicate that the situation is a bit more complicated than either "pernicious myth" or "probably illegal" in general (but much closer to toast0's understanding); my interpretation is that you can either avoid an 80% threshold of "disparate impact" or you can in theory formally validate that a particular test measures/predicts performance at a particular job; that all sounds compatible with "companies do it in the open, but very few, and you can easily get in trouble for doing it wrong"
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/1607.15 | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The comment to which I responded claimed that IQ tests "probably aren't legal in the US", which is false. They aren't more widely used because they don't work well for candidate selection, but they are used by very large companies that are attractive targets for employment discrimination suits, and wouldn't be if they were legally risky. There are well-known tech companies that up until a few years ago gave IQ tests to candidates! Empirical observation trumps axiomatic derivation in this case. |
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| ▲ | throw-qqqqq 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m from Northern Europe so YMMV, but in this country IQ/cognitive tests are quite common for senior roles or management. I’ve had to take a few. I don’t mind too much. It’s mostly to test if you are WAY below what they expect for the position. The personality trait tests are also quite common IME. | |
| ▲ | al_borland 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The military was pretty big on IQ testing, from what I understand. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but it seems like an efficient first pass to figure out where people should go. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 3 days ago | parent [-] | | They still do it; it's still very important to them. They maintain their own test, the ASVAB ("Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Apti... For a vivid picture of why the military is so insistent on IQ tests despite overwhelming political pressure to stop using them, you might like reading https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1... . | | |
| ▲ | OkayPhysicist 3 days ago | parent [-] | | From what I recall, the ASVAB wasn't really a general IQ test. It was more like an SAT with a broader focus than academics, basically "Are you basically adequate with Words/Numbers/machines/ etc" | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That's what a general IQ test is. Those aren't distinct concepts. The SAT is also a general IQ test. Notice how your score on the ASVAB (and on the SAT!) is a percentile rank, not a count of items you got right. Here's a sample question targeted at the Wonderlic, which is an IQ test that advertises itself as an IQ test: > The words PERCEIVE and DISCERN have ___?___ meanings. > A. similar > B. contradictory > C. unrelated Here's one from the ASVAB: > Quiver most nearly means > [ ] shake. > [ ] dance. > [ ] rest. > [ ] run. | | |
| ▲ | OkayPhysicist 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Huh. The IQ tests that I was administered as a kid I remember as being primarily focused on abstract pattern recognition, which is what I think of when I think "IQ test". But I suppose due to IQ's definition, if you just give someone a wide enough battery of cognitive tasks, you can derive the IQ score that way. I guess I always assumed that the ASVAB was used a bit more literally. "Ah, this person is barely literate, but knows all the parts of an engine. TO THE MOTOR POOL" | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > The IQ tests that I was administered as a kid I remember as being primarily focused on abstract pattern recognition, which is what I think of when I think "IQ test". That's just one specific IQ test, Raven's Progressive Matrices. > I guess I always assumed that the ASVAB was used a bit more literally. "Ah, this person is barely literate, but knows all the parts of an engine. TO THE MOTOR POOL" From https://www.officialasvab.com/applicants/faqs/ : > there is only one exam, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB for short. The ASVAB has 10 tests. Your scores from four of the tests—Word Knowledge (WK), Paragraph Comprehension (PC), Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), and Mathematics Knowledge (MK)—are combined to compute your score on what is referred to as the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). Scores on the AFQT are used to determine your eligibility for enlistment in the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps. Scores on all of the ASVAB tests are used to determine the best job for you in the military. You have to clear an IQ threshold to be eligible to enlist at all. Only after you're smart enough to be in the army will they consider which jobs you might do relatively better in. | | |
| ▲ | codethief 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > That's just one specific IQ test, Raven's Progressive Matrices. Not OP but thank you, now I finally know what that test that I took as a kid is called! |
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| ▲ | al_borland 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I had my IQ tested recently and the pattern recognition was part of it, but so were the word associations. Depending on how young you were, maybe they weight it more toward the abstract patterns, because no kid isn’t going to have a fully developed vocabulary. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If by "IQ test" you mean "any test that correlates well with other accepted IQ tests", then, sure, I guess. But there's a reason clinicians administer the Wechsler and not the SAT, and it's not just that the SAT takes longer. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure, the reason is that they want to do something that is "the same" as what they've done in the past, so that previous research will remain as valid as they hope it is. My mother is an obstetrician, and something that has always bothered her is that American hospitals have women lie on their backs to give birth. This is not a natural position, it's not comfortable for the women, and it can make it more difficult to get the baby out. So why do we do it? The answer is that, a long time ago, doctors who assumed that that was the correct way to give birth developed a set of standard measurements that determine what doctors today think of how far into the labor process a woman is. These measurements are only valid for a woman lying on her back - they will change if she shifts positions. They would have to be redone and revalidated for a woman in a natural delivery position. And nobody wants to do that. The SAT correlates as well with any given IQ test as other, "official" IQ tests do. It is an IQ test. It serves all of the purposes that IQ tests serve, and it cannot serve any purpose that they can't. It is more accurate than some very standard "accepted IQ tests" such as Draw-a-Man. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-a-Person_test ) But it's important to some people not to call it an IQ test. Try not to be one of those people. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Not a hill I'm going to die on, but the SAT has many attributes IQ-ists insist IQ tests are insulated from: it's straightforwardly trainable, culturally loaded, samples only math, processing speed, and verbal reasoning, and tracks prior educational experience as much as it does aptitude. Draw-a-Person basically isn't an IQ test at all, so I don't see how that comparison clears anything up. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Not a hill I'm going to die on, but the SAT has many attributes IQ-ists insist IQ tests are insulated from This is false. In particular: > it's straightforwardly trainable No, it isn't. There is an extensive literature on SAT prep, finding that it's worth a couple of points on the test. It is widely described as being trainable, but the opposite was always a design goal, and historically that goal was achieved very well. You might note that the Raven's matrices are infamous for huge training effects; that test relies on the testee having never seen it before. The SAT doesn't. > culturally loaded This claim is true, but nobody claims that IQ tests are insulated from being culturally loaded. The purpose of Raven's is to be a culture-free test. Wechsler makes no such pretense. > samples only math, processing speed, and verbal reasoning I'm not sure what you're saying here. > and tracks prior educational experience as much as it does aptitude. And this one is false. The point of the SAT is to test only low-level material so that you can be confident the entire test-taking population has been exposed to the material. Aptitude has a very large influence on SAT score; prior education has a negligible influence. (Prior education will have a larger influence if the population you're investigating includes a lot of people with no education, the kind of people who left school after or before kindergarten. But that scenario isn't relevant to... pretty much any question about the SAT.) > Draw-a-Person basically isn't an IQ test at all, so I don't see how that comparison clears anything up. It is an IQ test by the standard you defined: it holds itself out as being "an IQ test", and it is used by researchers to study the intelligence of testees. Did you want to use a different definition? | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Now I think you're the one defending a weird hill, because math is like half of the SAT, and trig is a learned skill, not a general cognitive ability. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There is no trigonometry on the SAT. Are you thinking of the subject tests? They don't differ in psychometric properties from the general SAT, but they do require more education before they make sense. |
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| ▲ | bryanrasmussen 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've had some IQ tests, one company is now bankrupt, was quite a famous Danish bankruptcy (they offered me the job but I turned it down which looked prescient a couple years later when they went bankrupt), another was Klarna, Boozt also uses a cognitive assessment. Klarna's seemed like the most proper IQ test although it had at least one question that was wrong. | |
| ▲ | ghostpepper 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just search (both on HN and the internet more broadly) for Canonical (the company that created Ubuntu) hiring horror stories | |
| ▲ | whstl 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It used to be VERY popular in enterprise, where HR professionals often coming from psychology handle most of the hiring. I have no idea why they did this, I guess that was the idea of a hiring process at the time. | | |
| ▲ | chaps 3 days ago | parent [-] | | My personal theory is that it's an easy way to say "no" if nothing else is easier. | | |
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| ▲ | tptacek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. Several large companies have been administering them (or equivalent general [non-domain-specific] cognitive aptitude tests) for decades. |
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