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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
golly_ned|5 months ago
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|5 months ago
spydum|5 months ago
mkipper|5 months ago
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.
toast0|5 months ago
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.
tptacek|5 months ago
throw-qqqqq|5 months ago
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.
al_borland|5 months ago
thaumasiotes|5 months ago
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/1... .
bryanrasmussen|5 months ago
Klarna's seemed like the most proper IQ test although it had at least one question that was wrong.
ghostpepper|5 months ago
whstl|5 months ago
I have no idea why they did this, I guess that was the idea of a hiring process at the time.
chaps|5 months ago
tptacek|5 months ago