[mrkeen]

This is keeping me out of work at the moment.

The usual flow is that I have a great HR interview, then I'm assigned an online intelligence (what dots should be in the next box) test and a personality test, and then the company wants nothing to do with me.

They manage to screen me out before I have the opportunity to talk about anything computing related.

(The old horror-stories of 'I couldn't reverse a BST on a whiteboard so I didn't get the job' seem wonderful in comparison now. The non-computing people have captured the hiring pipeline into computing companies)

[woadwarrior01]

I don't have a dog in the race, also I'm not based in the US, but aren't intelligence tests for hiring illegal in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

[mrkeen]

There are dozens - dozens! - of us outside the US.

I drew the opposite conclusion from your link: (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment tests that are not a 'reasonable measure of job performance'). All an employer would need to say is "We've found that people who can't dots-in-box are bad at cody"

I just dug up the link (https://www.alvalabs.io/hiring-system/assessments/logic-test) to take another look, and sure enough, there's giant text saying "A strong predictor of job performance." Consider HR's arses covered!

They have the nerve to label it is a "logic" test. I bet I'd be the only one on their staff able to write out simple natural deduction proofs.

[malfist]

Coinbase wanted me to do one before I did the second round of interviews and I'm in the US. Intelligence and personality tests. Wound up telling them that I didn't want to enable the type of discrimination they facilitate and that with the best faith reasoning for using them is at best a sign the company is indexing on the wrong things for hiring.

[535188B17C93743]

That told me they wanted me to do this and I told them to pound sand. Doesn't help that their online reviews indicate its a sweatshop.

Anyway, they did layoffs like 2 weeks later so I guess I dodged a bullet there.

[torben-friis]

Anecdotally, I've only seen them done in northern European companies, but every northern European company I've interviewed for had them. It seems to be a regional-ish thing.

[pclmulqdq]

Not if they are dressed up in a particular way, and not if intelligence is genuinely relevant. I have done a few of these tests for jobs in the US before. They are just bad.

[PaulHoule]

The 2000 census gave enumerator applicants a small multiple choice test that was similar to an IQ and then they hired foremen and line workers working down from the highest scores. I've never worked with as many smart people at a temp job!

[0123456789ABCDE]

apparently not

you can wait for a reply from tptacek later in the day, or use the search at the bottom to find previous replies

here: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tptacek%20iq%20test&sort=byDat...

[curiousllama]

NAL, but have worked in this. Griggs is a bit more complicated than that, and its progeny modify application anyway.

The TLDR is that arbitrary tests are permissible if there's no disparate impact. Tests with disparate impact are permissible iff they are not arbitrary (i.e., "directly" assess job responsibilities).

So, for example, Leetcode may have disparate impact, but it's "direct" enough to be permissible. On the other hand, most "AI Assessments" are actually so badly implemented that they're effectively random - and a coin flip won't have disparate impact.

[everdrive]

It's quite scary. I think a lot of these HR types are true believers. They think that

1) these tests are valid and objective

2) they are qualified to understand how personalities would interact in a complex system

It's astrology for professionals, and companies have let themselves be captured by what are effectively religious zealots.

[quickthrowman]

IIRC the personality tests are mostly designed to assess how a candidate deals with authority and to try and suss out if they’re consistent/honest. Testing for ‘personality disorders’ more or less.

I doubt the tests actually help, due to the reasons you provided (and more).

[lo_zamoyski]

> It's astrology for professionals

A lot of corporate "metrics" are pseudoscientific. They have a superficial veneer of being "scientific", because there's, like, math and numbers and stuff, man. The world continues to function despite this foolishness, not because of it.

Part of why this is so popular in the US is because the US is a hyper-individualistic culture. In other countries, relations are more important. This irks Americans who think this necessarily entails nepotism (it can), but I would say that 1) this overestimates the relative effectiveness and objectivity of low-info hiring practices, and 2) ignores the fact that all knowledge of another person occurs only through relationships. We're inherently social animals and organizations are inherently social phenomena. (2) is partly why many companies pay referral bonuses. They're relying on the knowledge of someone you have of someone you know. This makes sense. If I've worked with someone, I am in a much better position to evaluate their qualifications in a meaningful way than some HR person or some random whoever. A sane company doesn't care about satisfying some weird, arbitrary ideological benchmark. They care about assembling a team that can work effectively.

There's a mindset that freaks out over the mere potential for something to be abused or suboptimal or whatever, and categorically decides that it's better not to have that thing at all. (Gov't is a great example. Yes, gov'ts can become abusive, but they're also the only force that can stand between you and, say, abusive corporate power.)

Abusus non tollit usum.

[tapland]

I passed a series of those and since I remembered the questions from a relatives autism diagnosis testing I asked what they do since they are effectively filtering for things like that.

HR rep said those applicants should probably go see a shrink instead (!!???) and that was the end of me interviewing there.

The testing needs to end. The people using these tools don't know how they work, what they are testing and what blanket denials of personality types really means.

[onemoresoop]

Wait, they’re filtering out autistic traits or looking for them in candidates?

[sudosteph]

Filtering out is my guess.

About 20 years ago, I remember getting my hands on an answer key for the personality screener used to work at Target. This was just for a $7/hr cashier position, but it had a very low pass rate. To them, the ideal candidate for them was: always positive and optimistic, preferred being around people than being alone, never complained, frequently sought approval from peers and authorities, always followed every rule no matter what.

So it wasn't explicitly designed against people with disabilities, the rule-following aspect may be more present in autistic people - but for a lot of these, I can't see many people passing if they answered honestly.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> I can't see many people passing if they answered honestly.

You're not supposed to answer honestly, you're supposed to answer in such a way as to convince them to hire you.

[shagie]

"I know the rules of the game and what it will take to continue to be employed in this position."

---

One employer I had gave a test that included such questions as "It is ok to get into fights behind the store if you are not on the clock" and "It is ok to take inventory as long as it costs less than $5."

There are people who failed that test.

[tapland]

Exactly, you are supposed to have the know-how of how to answer this and, that too, screens away pesky neurodivergents.

[Eridrus]

You don't see how a customer facing position in a retail chain would reasonably want all these personality traits in their hires as a matter of operating a good business?

[naravara]

Wanting those traits and asking about those traits in a self-reporting questionnaire are two different things.

If it’s a questionnaire you are functionally just screening for liars or people who don’t know how to use the full spectrum of a distribution and put in 5/5 or 0/5 for everything.

[ddejohn]

I am miserably bad at soft-skills interviews and never get past this round. Been over a year since I've had somebody actually try to assess my technical competency in any real capacity.

I'm also getting maybe 1 INITIAL interview every 3 months right now because of this AI screening stuff and I just haven't felt like re-writing my resume to game them.

[woadwarrior01]

IMO, soft-skills interviews more a test of your storytelling abilities than anything else. At Google, people often used to joke about candidates who cannot even pass the Googleyness interview, which is supposed to be the easiest of all Google interviews.

[teiferer]

> miserably bad at soft-skills interviews

Is that because of an actual lack of soft skills or is it because the interviews are bad?

> I just haven't felt like re-writing my resume to game them.

Not defending the AI interview assistance BS, but if you wanted a job bad enough then you'd eventually do this, not the latest after several months?

[arethuza]

One thing I discovered years ago was that even if you are pretty good at soft-skills type stuff and also pretty good at technical stuff what I couldn't do is context switch between an hour or so of doing "soft" stuff to a technical question - even though it was a trivial question. I lost a CTO position over that - mind you I think they went out of business a couple of years later...

[justonceokay]

Aren’t soft skills much more important than hard skills when it comes to building a team?

[mrkeen]

It depends on the objective.

If you're trying to cultivate a chill workplace with colleagues you enjoy having coffee with, that's a different objective from building software which works correctly.

Right now I'm trying to watch Book of Boba Fett on Disney Plus. When I cast Disney to my TV and hit play, it shows the animated Disney logo and sound for about a second, pauses/buffers for a couple of seconds, and then skips to the start of the next episode (and so on, until it runs out of episodes). I can temporarily fix it by turning everything off and on again, and starting the episode on my tablet before hitting the cast button.

Maybe they have a really strong team, I dunno.

[simongr3dal]

Lots of people have a hard time just freebasing in an abstract conversation about how they work and storytelling “My Journey” type stuff but work just fine in an actual team setting with concrete products, features, and problems to think and talk about.

[ddejohn]

> storytelling “My Journey” type stuff

This is the stuff with which I struggle the most. I'm an introvert, and "my journey" sounds so insufferable and egotistical to me, I physically cringe at the thought of having to talk about this kind of stuff.

At the end of the day, I just want a paycheck and to work on at least marginally interesting problems. I'm not interested in having to lie about how passionate I am about what company X is doing, nor am I a salesperson that feels comfortable hyping myself up. It feels so fake it becomes a distraction during the interview, which causes me to freeze up and start floundering.

I work hard and I take pride in what I produce, I have plenty of hobbies and get along with others well, and I thrive in environments where I get to mentor and be mentored by others. These are the soft skills that are actually important for working on a team, but they're the most difficult to convey in the traditional interview format.

[elzbardico]

We need to be careful about those absolutes.

The guy from the carbon fiber + silver tape titanic sub had super people skills. But if you don’t want to be crushed in a submarine by a 10.000 feet water column, you’ll rather have the clumsy/awkward/jerk guy with superb tech skills leading the project.

[justonceokay]

You might be surprised to hear that there are great engineers who are also good at people skills.

[elzbardico]

In no place I said that there weren't. I don't understand where you got this idea.

[marcosdumay]

Are the soft skill important for team work the same they test on interviews?

Based on an experience of never seen the relevant skills tested, and never been able to test for them as an interviewer, I really, really doubt that.

[philipallstar]

The easier the task, the more likely it is for soft skills to matter.

[awesome_dude]

It could be that those HR teams are engaging in some busy work - pretending to be looking for candidates so they/their company looks busier.

[pjc50]

I suspect the counfounding factor of hundreds of other applicants makes it hard to tell whether you're specifically being discriminated against or just one of the 999 people who didn't get the job.

(There are some extreme measures that you can try like applying under a different name, although that then forces some awkwardness later on when you actually need your government name for tax and bank information)

[gobdovan]

> The old horror-stories of 'I couldn't reverse a BST on a whiteboard so I didn't get the job' seem wonderful in comparison now

> They manage to screen me out before I have the opportunity to talk about anything computing related

When I was in college about 10 years ago, I was dreaming a company would interview me on actual algorithms, but sadly I rarely had the occasion to do anything above basic coding.

If you want to see clearly what you can do to get hired, the following perspective helped me a lot. From experience, most hiring processes seem to be shaped less by technical signal and more by the interviewer's defensibility strategy in case of a bad hire. What I mean by that should be clearer from the list below:

- informal interview plus experience matching, hires based on how similar candidate prior jobs seem to be for current role <- if candidate is bad, the interviewer can justify the decision by pointing to the candidate's background.

- informal interview and vibe check with the team or personality test check if candidate is compliant if senior or charismatic if junior <- if the hire is bad, responsibility is diffused across the group.

- take-home project with a nominal 1-hour time limit, but an implicit expectation that candidates spend days on it. Since the interviewer cannot verify how long anyone spent, they default to rewarding the most polished submission.

- take-home project with narrow stated requirements, followed by judgment against unstated "best practices" the company follows <- if the hire is bad, the interviewer can point to the candidate's code and show it matched already what the company looked for, since the style is recognisable.

- CV farm, the company is collecting CVs and has no serious intent to hire <- interviewer doesn't exist

- if the interviewer has no skin in the game (is not verified, performance doesn't matter, they're a consultant leaving next month anyway), anything could happen. This is the most dangerous kind of interview because almost anything can happen and it gives you the least actionable data.

- formal interview pipeline, usually found at large corporations or in finance; interviewer has a clearly scoped job and are expected to evaluate one part of the candidate against a rubric, not make a general judgment about overall hireability. Biases will still exist, but they are more constrained because the process uses multiple interviewers, trained evaluators, explicit scoring grids <- if the hire is bad, the decision is defensible because the interviewer followed the assigned process.

So, interview pipelines can be predictable. It is that you should identify what kind of process you are in as early as possible. If it is experience matching, make your background look obviously adjacent to the role. If it is a take-home, assume polish will count more than the stated time limit. If it is a vibe screen, technical skill may not be the primary variable. If it is a formal pipeline, prepare for the rubric. And if it is a CV farm or a low-accountability interview, do not over-update on the rejection.

In your specific case, I wouldn't overindex on on the intelligence or personality assignment. More probable the CV already got deproritised, but they also sent you the test automatically. The rejection may tell you less about your ability than about the kind of pipeline you were in.

[Eridrus]

> hires based on how similar candidate prior jobs seem to be for current role <- if candidate is bad, the interviewer can justify the decision by pointing to the candidate's background.

I have found that people are often not very good at doing new things, so it is much easier to find someone to do the same job they've already done than to ask people to do even a slightly different job.

Some people are adaptable, but the vast majority are not.

[BigTTYGothGF]

Are you failing because of the dot test or because of the personality test?

[mrkeen]

They are smart enough not to say. The usual pipeline is HR then both Alva tests at once (which seems backward to me - why not use the screen as the actual screen, instead of wasting an hour of HR time). All I know is I'm in their pipeline after the HR but not after the Alva tests.

[BigTTYGothGF]

Let me rephrase that. In your own view, with which component of the test do you think you're having trouble getting through? How many times has this happened, and if it's more than twice have you considered some of the various test practice resources?

[acidhousemcnab]

Time and motion study neurodivergent slave class optimisation.

[motbus3]

Have a computer take your personality test is dystopian