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It would be really interesting to know to what extent their definitions of being over or under qualified is an approximation of IQ test scores. IQ tests have l
by wood_spirit 1y ago
It would be really interesting to know to what extent their definitions of being over or under qualified is an approximation of IQ test scores. IQ tests have lovers and loathers but a correlation or otherwise would say they are measuring something or not…
- zabzonk 1y agoPerhaps measuring how well people perform on IQ tests?
- chaps 1y agoTotal anecdata, but whenever I've had to take an IQ test for an interview process, it's never the IQ test that's used to disqualify me. It's usually something like culture fit. But these days if a job requires me to do an IQ test to join, I'll use that as a signal to get the fuck out of there and find a different role. So again, anecdata, but I suspect I'm not the only one who would eschew those results.
- spydum 1y agoI 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 agoIt 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.
- mkipper 1y agoI 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 agoAmazon 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 agoInteresting, thanks for sharing! Do you know what happened with the program and people hired this way? Was it generally successful?
- spydum 1y agothat 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 agoIt'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 agoI’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 agoGeneral 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 agoThis 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 agoI'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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoThey 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 agoFrom 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 agoThat'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 agoHuh. 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 agoJust search (both on HN and the internet more broadly) for Canonical (the company that created Ubuntu) hiring horror stories
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoI'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 agoYes. Several large companies have been administering them (or equivalent general [non-domain-specific] cognitive aptitude tests) for decades.
- ecshafer 1y agoMilitary takes the ASVAB which is basically the SAT / IQ Test which qualifies you were certain jobs. For example Nukes in the Navy (which is considered one of the hardest programs for obvious reasons) is 252 score for some combination of scores.
- neilv 1y agoI've worked with at least two such "Nukes". One a researcher, the other a tech startup founder. Both very smart, team-oriented, amiable and down to earth, and inspiring respect (through their ability and how they conduct themselves). I suppose, on a sub, besides whatever admissions filtering they do for aptitude, you have to take work seriously, and also cooperate and get along with people.
- alchemical_piss 1y agoIf the ASVAB is basically an IQ test, I’m horrified by how quickly my intelligence has decayed. When I took it in HS, I scored quite well. I’m almost certain I’m bomb it completely now. Particularly any mathematics I haven’t touched since high school would look foreign to me.
- nonameiguess 1y agoIt's exactly what it is. When someone enlists in the US military, they take what is called the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery). It's more specific to the military than Stanford-Binet, but effectively it is still an IQ test. Specific military occupational specialties have minimum score requirements to qualify for that job. Which job you actually end up getting is a combination of scoring high enough to qualify, scoring higher than everyone else who wants the same job, doing well on other things they assess you on, and needs of the branch of service at the time you enlist. Score high enough for cyber but they only need mechanics, then you're becoming a mechanic. Conversely, if they badly need cyber professionals but nobody scores high enough to meet the official bar, they're still putting people into that job. Hence, why the mismatch exists in the first place and why there's a study like this.
- nativeit 1y agoMy understanding is that IQ tests can measure a type of intelligence, but fixation on its narrow metrics can lead one to overlook other attributes that are just as likely to be relevant, but aren’t something that necessarily shows up in standardized tests. Add to that the fact that IQ tests can be heavily biased, and leave a lot of ambiguity for the proctors to interpret, it’s not a surprise that they’re so controversial. I personally would be very suspicious if asked to sit for an IQ test as part of a job evaluation. I have worked for places that blindly worship context-free performance metrics, and it was insufferable.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoIQ is a correlation variable that pops out when you measure any group of people's aptitude at a battery of tasks that involve thinking. Basically, if someone's good at one task that involves thinking (say, chess), they're more likely to be good at another task that involves thinking (say, reading comprehension). Apply some Bayesian statistics, and boom, you've concluded that there's some confounding variable (that we call IQ). Then you can start measuring how strongly certain tasks correlate with variable. Turns out abstract pattern recognition very strongly correlated with this unknown variable, so we can use that to predict what someone's IQ likely is. The point is, due to the very definition of IQ, it's not a narrow metric, and selecting for it does tend to find you individuals who are going to be better than average at most anything. That said, it would seem alarming to me for a job to give me an IQ test instead of cutting out the correlation coefficient and just judging me on the task they're hiring me for.