This is keeping me out of work at the moment.

The usual flow is that I have a great HR interview, then I'm assigned an online intelligence (what dots should be in the next box) test and a personality test, and then the company wants nothing to do with me.

They manage to screen me out before I have the opportunity to talk about anything computing related.

(The old horror-stories of 'I couldn't reverse a BST on a whiteboard so I didn't get the job' seem wonderful in comparison now. The non-computing people have captured the hiring pipeline into computing companies)

I don't have a dog in the race, also I'm not based in the US, but aren't intelligence tests for hiring illegal in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

I am miserably bad at soft-skills interviews and never get past this round. Been over a year since I've had somebody actually try to assess my technical competency in any real capacity.

I'm also getting maybe 1 INITIAL interview every 3 months right now because of this AI screening stuff and I just haven't felt like re-writing my resume to game them.

> The old horror-stories of 'I couldn't reverse a BST on a whiteboard so I didn't get the job' seem wonderful in comparison now

> They manage to screen me out before I have the opportunity to talk about anything computing related

When I was in college about 10 years ago, I was dreaming a company would interview me on actual algorithms, but sadly I rarely had the occasion to do anything above basic coding.

If you want to see clearly what you can do to get hired, the following perspective helped me a lot. From experience, most hiring processes seem to be shaped less by technical signal and more by the interviewer's defensibility strategy in case of a bad hire. What I mean by that should be clearer from the list below:

- informal interview plus experience matching, hires based on how similar candidate prior jobs seem to be for current role <- if candidate is bad, the interviewer can justify the decision by pointing to the candidate's background.

- informal interview and vibe check with the team or personality test check if candidate is compliant if senior or charismatic if junior <- if the hire is bad, responsibility is diffused across the group.

- take-home project with a nominal 1-hour time limit, but an implicit expectation that candidates spend days on it. Since the interviewer cannot verify how long anyone spent, they default to rewarding the most polished submission.

- take-home project with narrow stated requirements, followed by judgment against unstated "best practices" the company follows <- if the hire is bad, the interviewer can point to the candidate's code and show it matched already what the company looked for, since the style is recognisable.

- CV farm, the company is collecting CVs and has no serious intent to hire <- interviewer doesn't exist

- if the interviewer has no skin in the game (is not verified, performance doesn't matter, they're a consultant leaving next month anyway), anything could happen. This is the most dangerous kind of interview because almost anything can happen and it gives you the least actionable data.

- formal interview pipeline, usually found at large corporations or in finance; interviewer has a clearly scoped job and are expected to evaluate one part of the candidate against a rubric, not make a general judgment about overall hireability. Biases will still exist, but they are more constrained because the process uses multiple interviewers, trained evaluators, explicit scoring grids <- if the hire is bad, the decision is defensible because the interviewer followed the assigned process.

So, interview pipelines can be predictable. It is that you should identify what kind of process you are in as early as possible. If it is experience matching, make your background look obviously adjacent to the role. If it is a take-home, assume polish will count more than the stated time limit. If it is a vibe screen, technical skill may not be the primary variable. If it is a formal pipeline, prepare for the rubric. And if it is a CV farm or a low-accountability interview, do not over-update on the rejection.

In your specific case, I wouldn't overindex on on the intelligence or personality assignment. More probable the CV already got deproritised, but they also sent you the test automatically. The rejection may tell you less about your ability than about the kind of pipeline you were in.

Have a computer take your personality test is dystopian