7 ms·

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.

by spydum 1y ago

whstl 1y ago
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 1y ago
  My personal theory is that it's an easy way to say "no" if nothing else is easier.
  - goopypoop 1y ago
    "sorry but it says here you're stupid"
mkipper 1y ago
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.
golly_ned 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Interesting, thanks for sharing! Do you know what happened with the program and people hired this way? Was it generally successful?
- spydum 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
throw-qqqqq 1y ago
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.
toast0 1y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
- tptacek 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/1607.15
    - tptacek 1y ago
      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.
al_borland 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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_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/1495805484 https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1... .
  - OkayPhysicist 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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"
ghostpepper 1y ago
Just search (both on HN and the internet more broadly) for Canonical (the company that created Ubuntu) hiring horror stories
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
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.
tptacek 1y ago
Yes. Several large companies have been administering them (or equivalent general [non-domain-specific] cognitive aptitude tests) for decades.

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.

by spydum 1y ago

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.

whstl 1y ago

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 1y ago
My personal theory is that it's an easy way to say "no" if nothing else is easier.
- goopypoop 1y ago
  "sorry but it says here you're stupid"

mkipper 1y ago

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.

golly_ned 1y ago

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 1y ago
Interesting, thanks for sharing! Do you know what happened with the program and people hired this way? Was it generally successful?
spydum 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.

throw-qqqqq 1y ago

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.

toast0 1y ago

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

tptacek 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/29/1607.15
  - tptacek 1y ago
    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.

al_borland 1y ago

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 1y ago
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_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/1495805484 https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1... .
- OkayPhysicist 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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"

ghostpepper 1y ago

Just search (both on HN and the internet more broadly) for Canonical (the company that created Ubuntu) hiring horror stories

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

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.

tptacek 1y ago

Yes. Several large companies have been administering them (or equivalent general [non-domain-specific] cognitive aptitude tests) for decades.