IQ is an attempt to measure human intelligence. Technical interviews while correlated to intelligence are not trying to directly measure it. In theory one shou

IQ is an attempt to measure human intelligence. Technical interviews while correlated to intelligence are not trying to directly measure it. In theory one should be able to improve on their technical abilities regardless of their intelligence. However, they can not increase their intelligence (at least not dramatically). I think it's fair to say that technical interviews are simply fairer for this reason since someone can work at being competent at a specific set of skills while not being able to work at being more generally intelligent (as measured by IQ). Given performance on IQ tests tend to correlate to one's social economic background, I believe the political motivation isn't just about what's in the best interest for individual job seekers, but also because IQ tests could be used as way to screen out otherwise competent candidates that come from "undesirable" social economic backgrounds. Personally I think IQ is underrated as a general measure of intelligence and is a very good indicator of potential competency at any given skill. In my experience high IQ individuals are simply nicer and more interesting people. They're also able to pick up things significantly faster where IQ differences are large. For all its flaws if I could only rely one data point for a hiring decision (at least for a technical role) it would be IQ. I say this as someone who generally scores poorly in high quality IQ tests. The only exception to this is if I'm given a non-verbal IQ test like Raven's progressive matrices, then I'll typically score in the top few percent of the population. For this reason if you set someone like myself a technical test I'd probably pass it, but this would be unfortunate because you'd then find out I'm unable to communicate and have barely functioning memory. In which case you'd probably wish you hired someone who preformed worse on the technical test but had a higher IQ. And this is why IQ is so useful – it tends to correlate with broadly with the type of person you'd want to hire.