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Agreed. I would actually laugh at someone who asked me for SAT scores. I'd want to see actual research documenting that SAT's are actually a good predictor of j

Agreed. I would actually laugh at someone who asked me for SAT scores. I'd want to see actual research documenting that SAT's are actually a good predictor of job performance in the long run. (Hint: they arent). In the consulting field, I would expect people to do their research before they pick arbitrary metrics of selection. They might as well ask you your favorite university or sports team. That (might) be barely classifiable as a culture fit... Its really amusing to me that companies use this as a valid benchmark. Especially, as the article states, for SALES of all things. Configuresoft Inc., a Woodland Park, Colo., systems-management software company, requires combined scores of 1,400 in CR and math for applicants applying for sales positions. A spokesman for the firm said the company's clients routinely demand salespeople with high test scores. I declare shenanigans. When (in the course of a sales discussion) does the salesperson's high school SAT scores come up? How about never. If anyone knows these guys or has seen these practices, I'd love to hear the actual basis for this from an HR perspective, since I dont believe the research on the topic puts SAT's anywhere near predictive, especially in sales.

dschobel 18y ago
How do you measure an entry-level candidate salesperson otherwise though? In CS you can ask theory questions and ask them to program something for you. In sales you... ? I agree it may be a lousy metric, but that doesn't mean it's not the best one they have.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  Traditionally in sales you hire a ton of candidates, give them hefty performance goals right out of the gate, and then fire over 80% of them in the first month. Rinse and repeat until you have your organization staffed. It's a brutal field.
  - bd 18y ago
    We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? ... Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/quotes http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/quotes
- Brushfire 18y ago
  As another poster mentioned, sales is very performance oriented. Either you make your numbers, or you dont. This sounds like a bad way to hire, but actually it works very well and is fair. Also, per your own example, they ask you about theory questions. This is, in some sense, a job-sample test. Many developers are asked to write code during an interview. That is a job-sample. Salespeople are often asked to sell something arbitrary. Job-samples are VERY valid predictors.
- philwelch 18y ago
  Hypothetically, just interviewing the candidate at all should be enough, since a job interview is just an opportunity for the candidate to sell themselves. If they're good at sales, they'll sell themselves and make you want to hire them. Interviewing CS folks is hard in comparison because selling yourself in an interview is a talent that has almost nothing to do with making software.
dsil 18y ago
You still need to be smart to be a good salesperson, and what this article is claiming is that you can't really compare grades at one highschool or college to grades at others, but the SAT is one universal test given the same way across the country. Its biased and imperfect, but at least its comparing apples to apples. That said, I'd also like to see research on SATs as a predictor of job performance, either way. You say they aren't...do you have a link to some research finding that?
- Brushfire 18y ago
  Unfortunately, I dont have any easily referenced research in front of me or easily found. But I did take a significant number of HR classes, and I remember those professors railing against industry for horrible, unscientific decision making metrics across the board. Unstructured interviews are by far the worst predictive methods, but SAT and IQ are very poor predictive measurements. They measure intelligence, sort of. In fact, they don't really even measure intelligence that well, becuase you can heavily study for them. Even setting that aside, intelligence is also a bad metric for job performance in most fields. Motivation, Past Job/Work Experience or Work Sample tests, and Psychological factors are much more predictive. Anecdotally, I'm sure most people that can think of very intelligent people that are very bad employees. And also some that are very good employees. And plenty that are average employees. --------- EDIT: After digging out my books, I'm dead wrong. :) Willing to admit it. I think my memory was confusing job satisfaction with job performance. From one of my textbooks, as a summary: Mental ability tests, and those been called intelligence, or IQ, tests are the same type of tests. The term mental ability makes explicit that these tests measure various cognitive abilities of the applicant. That is, these are abilities that primarily indicate the individual's level of mental manipulation of words, figures, numbers, symbols, and logical order. Following from this, it is fairly easy to understand the strong relationship between mental ability test scores and academic performance. Formal education primarily stresses cognitive exercises and memorization of facts, and these are the components that make up a large part of most mental ability tests. This however, does not mean that mental ability is useful only for academic selection. Many jobs in organizations demand the use of mental abilities, including managerial, technical, and some clerical jobs to name but a few.....Only one of these devices, work sample tests, has a higher validity than does mental ability tests.... What can we conclude from all these data about the use of cognitive ability tests in selection? Two factors must be taken into account when answering this question. The first is that evidence seems to be overwhelming that these tests are among the most valid of all selection tests for a large number of jobs, some selection specialists would say for all jobs. The second factor is the evidence that these test exhibit adverse impact...among demographic groups. But becuase these tests are also valid, there is a good chance that their use in selection could be defended against claims of discrimination. Therefor, some have thought that cognitive ability tests should be used extensively in selection. ("Human Resource Selection", Gatewood & Field, 2001) I stand corrected, by myself. :) Unfortunately, the research I'm reading through doesnt specifically address SAT as a method, just 'intelligence tests' in general, and has some industry-specific mental/cognitive ability tests. For those interested, this category includes things like the Wonderlic, the Minnesota Clerical Test, and the General Aptitute Test Battery. I'm still curious about how well this translates into Sales, but that will be a personal research project for later date.
wheels 18y ago
Anecdotal, but recently one of my old college roommates who I remember had a score of somewhere in the 1400-1500 range tried his hand at a sales job. I think he lasted 3 days before getting fired. Honestly, thinking back through my college best friends (the only group of friends whose SAT scores I ever knew) I think our sales ability would be in inverse order of SAT scores. The one that had the lowest scores currently does non-profit fundraising (meaning she regularly pulls in donors signing tens to hundreds of thousand dollar checks).
andylei 18y ago
i don't think it's that ridiculous. if i'm a recruiter for a consulting company (or any type of company), i want to know if you're smart. i can figure it out by talking to you, but that's limited by your ability to bullshit and my ability to figure it out. SAT scores can give them a little more information about you. only stupid recruiters hire based primarily on SAT scores. It's silly to say that SAT scores should have zero influence. if you were hiring and saw two identical candidates (or more realistically, two candidates that, considering everything else, you thought were equally qualified), would you choose the one with the better SAT score, or flip a coin? Asking for SAT scores only takes 5 seconds.
chris11 18y ago
I am slightly interested in finance, mainly quantitative trading. While looking into the field, I found that the more selective banks and hedge funds asked for SAT scores. I got the impression that the only companies that really care about SAT scores are the more prestigious ones, and those generally used it as a filter. If HR is interviewing top students from the ivies or MIT, I doubt a score at or above the 95% would be extremely impressive. I'd be surprised if most companies cared. I did find one article talking about hiring the link between SAT scores and a fund manager's annual returns.http://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1891 http://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1891 I have put test scores on my resume. I did decently well, so so my scores show some indication of intelligence. I don't really think most companies are very impressed by high SAT scores though. But I would doubt people would see a decent SAT score on a resume as a negative, and some companies care about SAT scores.
sgk284 18y ago
Interesting points you bring up and Google effectively came to the same conclusion when they were smaller (low hundreds instead of tens of thousands of employees). Everything at Google is data driven, including the hiring, but things have changed drastically. Back in the day, Larry and Sergey had a forumla that used the SATs and your graduating GPA. The theory was that your SAT was a measure of your potential, and your GPA was the ability to deliver on that potential. As you can imagine that ultimately ended in failure, but kind of an interesting idea none-the-less. Since then they've wound up taking a much more Googly approach to hiring, by collecting tons of data from their employees. They effectively gave everyone a survey that attempted to figure out what defined the Google culture and success there-in. By hiring people consistent with this data, the theory is that they can better keep the culture and continue to hire successful engineers. Lots of interesting tidbits came from the study, but the most interesting was that a masters degree will (statistically) always outperform a b.s, but a phd is closer to a 50/50 for outperforming a masters (they attribute this to being too specialized. I forget the phd-to-b.s. probability). All this is from memory and is a couple of years old, so take it as you may.
- Brushfire 18y ago
  This is not a new thing that google invented (although, its possible they did it much better). According to some of the things I've read today, one of the benefits of using intelligence tests is that they tend to be valid across industries and positions, which means that unlike many other forms of hiring selection, you do not need to do an internal HR audit for applicability. This makes them convenient for enterprises of all sizes. However, in the past, and currently for items like psychological / social fit / performance metrics, etc, it was usually necessary for a company to find their good hiring metrics by doing an audit of previous 'successful' vs ' unsuccessful' employees, and compare attributes. The successful employees made up the desirable attributes, as you might expect, and this is what HR looked for. There are many, MANY problems with this way of thinking, but it did work fairly well, I think. This has been done for a long time, and the army started it. It seems likely the one thing google could apply to the process is its significant algorithmic capabilities.
tigerthink 18y ago
Doesn't IQ correlate well with job performance? Don't you think the SAT predicts IQ fairly well?

dschobel 18y ago

How do you measure an entry-level candidate salesperson otherwise though? In CS you can ask theory questions and ask them to program something for you. In sales you... ? I agree it may be a lousy metric, but that doesn't mean it's not the best one they have.

jacoblyles 18y ago
Traditionally in sales you hire a ton of candidates, give them hefty performance goals right out of the gate, and then fire over 80% of them in the first month. Rinse and repeat until you have your organization staffed. It's a brutal field.
- bd 18y ago
  We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? ... Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/quotes http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/quotes
Brushfire 18y ago
As another poster mentioned, sales is very performance oriented. Either you make your numbers, or you dont. This sounds like a bad way to hire, but actually it works very well and is fair. Also, per your own example, they ask you about theory questions. This is, in some sense, a job-sample test. Many developers are asked to write code during an interview. That is a job-sample. Salespeople are often asked to sell something arbitrary. Job-samples are VERY valid predictors.
philwelch 18y ago
Hypothetically, just interviewing the candidate at all should be enough, since a job interview is just an opportunity for the candidate to sell themselves. If they're good at sales, they'll sell themselves and make you want to hire them. Interviewing CS folks is hard in comparison because selling yourself in an interview is a talent that has almost nothing to do with making software.

dsil 18y ago

You still need to be smart to be a good salesperson, and what this article is claiming is that you can't really compare grades at one highschool or college to grades at others, but the SAT is one universal test given the same way across the country. Its biased and imperfect, but at least its comparing apples to apples. That said, I'd also like to see research on SATs as a predictor of job performance, either way. You say they aren't...do you have a link to some research finding that?

Brushfire 18y ago
Unfortunately, I dont have any easily referenced research in front of me or easily found. But I did take a significant number of HR classes, and I remember those professors railing against industry for horrible, unscientific decision making metrics across the board. Unstructured interviews are by far the worst predictive methods, but SAT and IQ are very poor predictive measurements. They measure intelligence, sort of. In fact, they don't really even measure intelligence that well, becuase you can heavily study for them. Even setting that aside, intelligence is also a bad metric for job performance in most fields. Motivation, Past Job/Work Experience or Work Sample tests, and Psychological factors are much more predictive. Anecdotally, I'm sure most people that can think of very intelligent people that are very bad employees. And also some that are very good employees. And plenty that are average employees. --------- EDIT: After digging out my books, I'm dead wrong. :) Willing to admit it. I think my memory was confusing job satisfaction with job performance. From one of my textbooks, as a summary: Mental ability tests, and those been called intelligence, or IQ, tests are the same type of tests. The term mental ability makes explicit that these tests measure various cognitive abilities of the applicant. That is, these are abilities that primarily indicate the individual's level of mental manipulation of words, figures, numbers, symbols, and logical order. Following from this, it is fairly easy to understand the strong relationship between mental ability test scores and academic performance. Formal education primarily stresses cognitive exercises and memorization of facts, and these are the components that make up a large part of most mental ability tests. This however, does not mean that mental ability is useful only for academic selection. Many jobs in organizations demand the use of mental abilities, including managerial, technical, and some clerical jobs to name but a few.....Only one of these devices, work sample tests, has a higher validity than does mental ability tests.... What can we conclude from all these data about the use of cognitive ability tests in selection? Two factors must be taken into account when answering this question. The first is that evidence seems to be overwhelming that these tests are among the most valid of all selection tests for a large number of jobs, some selection specialists would say for all jobs. The second factor is the evidence that these test exhibit adverse impact...among demographic groups. But becuase these tests are also valid, there is a good chance that their use in selection could be defended against claims of discrimination. Therefor, some have thought that cognitive ability tests should be used extensively in selection. ("Human Resource Selection", Gatewood & Field, 2001) I stand corrected, by myself. :) Unfortunately, the research I'm reading through doesnt specifically address SAT as a method, just 'intelligence tests' in general, and has some industry-specific mental/cognitive ability tests. For those interested, this category includes things like the Wonderlic, the Minnesota Clerical Test, and the General Aptitute Test Battery. I'm still curious about how well this translates into Sales, but that will be a personal research project for later date.

wheels 18y ago

Anecdotal, but recently one of my old college roommates who I remember had a score of somewhere in the 1400-1500 range tried his hand at a sales job. I think he lasted 3 days before getting fired. Honestly, thinking back through my college best friends (the only group of friends whose SAT scores I ever knew) I think our sales ability would be in inverse order of SAT scores. The one that had the lowest scores currently does non-profit fundraising (meaning she regularly pulls in donors signing tens to hundreds of thousand dollar checks).

andylei 18y ago

i don't think it's that ridiculous. if i'm a recruiter for a consulting company (or any type of company), i want to know if you're smart. i can figure it out by talking to you, but that's limited by your ability to bullshit and my ability to figure it out. SAT scores can give them a little more information about you. only stupid recruiters hire based primarily on SAT scores. It's silly to say that SAT scores should have zero influence. if you were hiring and saw two identical candidates (or more realistically, two candidates that, considering everything else, you thought were equally qualified), would you choose the one with the better SAT score, or flip a coin? Asking for SAT scores only takes 5 seconds.

chris11 18y ago

I am slightly interested in finance, mainly quantitative trading. While looking into the field, I found that the more selective banks and hedge funds asked for SAT scores. I got the impression that the only companies that really care about SAT scores are the more prestigious ones, and those generally used it as a filter. If HR is interviewing top students from the ivies or MIT, I doubt a score at or above the 95% would be extremely impressive. I'd be surprised if most companies cared. I did find one article talking about hiring the link between SAT scores and a fund manager's annual returns.http://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1891 http://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1891 I have put test scores on my resume. I did decently well, so so my scores show some indication of intelligence. I don't really think most companies are very impressed by high SAT scores though. But I would doubt people would see a decent SAT score on a resume as a negative, and some companies care about SAT scores.

sgk284 18y ago

Interesting points you bring up and Google effectively came to the same conclusion when they were smaller (low hundreds instead of tens of thousands of employees). Everything at Google is data driven, including the hiring, but things have changed drastically. Back in the day, Larry and Sergey had a forumla that used the SATs and your graduating GPA. The theory was that your SAT was a measure of your potential, and your GPA was the ability to deliver on that potential. As you can imagine that ultimately ended in failure, but kind of an interesting idea none-the-less. Since then they've wound up taking a much more Googly approach to hiring, by collecting tons of data from their employees. They effectively gave everyone a survey that attempted to figure out what defined the Google culture and success there-in. By hiring people consistent with this data, the theory is that they can better keep the culture and continue to hire successful engineers. Lots of interesting tidbits came from the study, but the most interesting was that a masters degree will (statistically) always outperform a b.s, but a phd is closer to a 50/50 for outperforming a masters (they attribute this to being too specialized. I forget the phd-to-b.s. probability). All this is from memory and is a couple of years old, so take it as you may.

Brushfire 18y ago
This is not a new thing that google invented (although, its possible they did it much better). According to some of the things I've read today, one of the benefits of using intelligence tests is that they tend to be valid across industries and positions, which means that unlike many other forms of hiring selection, you do not need to do an internal HR audit for applicability. This makes them convenient for enterprises of all sizes. However, in the past, and currently for items like psychological / social fit / performance metrics, etc, it was usually necessary for a company to find their good hiring metrics by doing an audit of previous 'successful' vs ' unsuccessful' employees, and compare attributes. The successful employees made up the desirable attributes, as you might expect, and this is what HR looked for. There are many, MANY problems with this way of thinking, but it did work fairly well, I think. This has been done for a long time, and the army started it. It seems likely the one thing google could apply to the process is its significant algorithmic capabilities.

tigerthink 18y ago

Doesn't IQ correlate well with job performance? Don't you think the SAT predicts IQ fairly well?