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No, they don't exist. First of all, your question has no objective test function. Let's put aside that totally fundamental issue. In that case, you would nee
by npk 19y ago
No, they don't exist. First of all, your question has no objective test function. Let's put aside that totally fundamental issue. In that case, you would need a test that distinguishes out of a small group of people, and would not have any statistical robustness.
Another way to look at this problem is, if such a test exists, why doesn't everyone use it? The SAT, for example, is very well correlated with intelligence. Most companies don't care about it.
The overarching question, "how do you weed out good people?" is a fundamental challenge of running business. Generally, the advice is to hire people that you personally know are good. If that doesn't work, hire the good people that other good people know, if that doesn't work, maybe you or your pitch is not that good.
- keiretsu 19y agoactually, i would look at SAT. Not as a major decision point, but just one small factor in the entire hiring process. IQ test would take another small factor. Personality another factor, Familiarity with the domain you are hiring for another factor. Experience another factor. and so on. This way, even if you don't score well for your SAT, your other factors may make up for it. isn't this how Google now automate their hiring process (at least in the initial stage to filter out the crap)? Categorize their current best and worst employees based on these factors. Then get the factors of the interviewees and run them on their bayesian classifier and it will indicate whether the interviewee is likely to be a good or bad employee.
- abstractbill 19y agoI would think twice about working for anyone who gave me an IQ test. Not because I think I'd do badly on it, but because of what it says about that employer.
- keiretsu 19y agowhat does it say about the employer?
- npk 19y agoThat they don't really understand statistics.
- keiretsu 19y agoso you are inferring that there is enough statistical evidence to prove the hypothesis that a high iq person does not make for a good employee.
- npk 19y agoYou're falling into a trap. Using the vocabulary of statistics does not mean you are thinking statistically. The classic refute, "correlation does not imply causation," applies here. I bet that the top people at top companies have high IQs, this does not mean that a high IQ person makes a top employee. I'm assuming you're hiring someone at a high level for a small company. Performing an IQ test is too much effort for not enough gain. As a result, you are performing a reverse IQ test. Intelligent people, asked to take an IQ test to join a one person startup, will view it as a waste of their time, and walk away. Go ahead, ask for SAT score. The most useful aspect of SAT score is in establishing company culture. It seems to me that you want to form a company where employess are the top grads from top universities. This is a classic, and successful model for hiring people. Asking potentital employess to take an IQ test will harm you in the end.
- keiretsu 19y agosee my comment below. I'm not planning to ask them to take a full blown iq tests. Just those "iq games" that i find are empirically good in classifying the smart from the non-smart
- run4yourlives 19y agoGood luck to you. Seriously, it already appears that you have made up your mind and don't need any more of our advice. 3 separate people have pointed out why IQ test are a bad idea, yet you are still not convinced. There is not much else to say except good luck.
- phony_identity 19y agoYou couldn't be more wrong. Such tests do exist, (in fact, as you say, the SAT test has a strong correlation with intelligence) but US corporations have been forbidden to use such tests since the 'Griggs vs. Duke Power' case of 1971. So instead, people doing hiring let college admissions departments do their intelligence testing. If you got into Harvard, that probably says something about your IQ. Of course, this is a much worse situation, and has a lot to do with our current overemphasis on educational credentials, and skyrocketing tuition costs. It's not that companies don't care about IQ, it's that they are disallowed from using it explicitly.
- phony_identity 19y agoYou couldn't be more wrong. Such tests do exist, (in fact, as you say, the SAT test has a strong correlation with intelligence) but US corporations have been forbidden to use such tests since the 'Griggs vs. Duke Power' case of 1971. So instead, people doing hiring let college admissions departments do their intelligence testing. If you got into Harvard, that probably says something about your IQ. Of course, this is a much worse situation, and has a lot to do with our current overemphasis on educational credentials, and skyrocketing tuition costs. It's not that companies don't care about IQ, it's that they are disallowed from using it explicitly.
- Darmani 19y agoActually, hiring assessments do exist and are legal to use. Creating hiring assessments is part of the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology (I believe it's called "Work Psychology" in the UK). For example, one I/O Psychologist I know has a consulting business, among other things, administering an assessment called the Totalview 2000 to potential hirees for many organizations. It basically works by first testing the personality and several aptitudes of existing top performers for a specific job at an organization to create a benchmark for top-performers, and then comparing the scores of applicants against the benchmark. Unfortunately, as such it is very specific (e.g.: the benchmarks for the same position at two different offices of the same engineering firm differ slightly because said offices take different clients), and only works well if you already have several identified top performers.