San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
This is patently false, and in this context (flat out stating that a hiring practice is illegal) quite arguably libelous.
The case in question:
(1) Did not rule that IQ tests violate the Civil Rights Act,
(2) Did not rule that tests unrelated to job functions violate the Civil Rights Act, and
(3) Did not characterize IQ tests are, categorically, unrelated to job functions.
What it did rule was that:
(A) The IQ tests used were unrelated to the job functions the employer in the case was using them for, and
(B) The IQ test used produced a differential adverse impact on black applicants for the positions, and
(C) Tests or other hiring criteria that produce and differential adverse impact on applicants based on a protected class (like race) and which are also unrelated (or not sufficiently related) to job functions violate the Civil Rights Act.
There are a number of subsequent cases where IQ tests have been found not to be unrelated to the job functions they were being used to screen applicants for.
I remember when sfgate was an imprint of the SF Chronicle (and the latter was a respected regional newspaper) with serious journalistic quality, but it seems to have degraded into trash where the attention to factual detail that goes into random anonymous forum posts is about all articles get.
Police departments have successfully sued for the use of IQ tests in their hiring practices.
More accurately, they have successfully defended suits challenging their use. (In the most notable case, with a high score being a disqualifying factor.)
I'd personally put more weight on "what's your Hogwarts house" from Buzzfeed than both of these.
MBTI is quite commonly used to characterize what types of jobs an individual might take on. If you understand a person's personality, it gives you a way of imagining how you might work with them. It's also popularly used in romantic dating, for the same reason.
...it's not through MBTI.
I am an employer. When I interview job candidates, I ask them about their lives, about their day, where they grew up, and lots of questions because I am starting a relationship with them.
The interview is not just a place to filter employees. It's also where you begin a relationship with them. You are envisioning how you might employ them. What kind of work could they do? Could they work well with John and Alice? How does it feel to talk to them? Do they like it when I'm direct, or when I speak softly?
I'm sorry that you've had such a cynical view on hiring, but the reality is that, yes, employers do use MBTI to get a richer understanding of their candidates. Here are some additional examples for you: https://www.talentinsights.com/blog/using-myers-briggs-in-hi...
Personally I hate MBTI, not the test itself but the industry using it as the "sole" tools and main tools to access candidate. i.e If you dont fit type X in the test they are not good for the job. For some strange reason it is heavily used in luxury goods industry.
I still maintain that good hiring is 90% gut feeling.
"When evaluating candidates who will be working with large amounts of money, should you give them the Not-IQ-but-we-all-know-that's-what-it-is test:
a) before you weed out the minorities, who by definition cannot be trusted around nor deserve large amounts of money
b) after you weed out the minorities, who by definition cannot be trusted around nor deserve large amounts of money
c) I find this question offensive and would like to out myself as either a minority, who by definition cannot be trusted around nor deserve large amounts of money, or a minority sympathizer
d) An IQ test is not needed because there are other, more legal, ways to weed out minorities, who by definition cannot be trusted around nor deserve large amounts of money"
d) is the trap choice, as the IQ test is entirely for the benefit of the candidate so they feel like they're part of the "exclusive club" of smart non-minorities who by definition can be trusted around and deserve large amounts of money. b) is then the obvious answer as there is no risk of a non-minority complaining because only an asshole would apply to work at a big hedge fund.
For me that would be the only piece of information I'd find interesting,
but before that could happen I'd have to be willing to inflict that kind of nonsense on someone in the first place.
"I asked you to perform a demeaning task just to see if you would do it, not because I actually need it done. I wouldn't have done it. This is how the best relationships all start."
"We granted the writ in this case to resolve the question whether an employer is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, from requiring a high school education or passing of a standardized general intelligence test as a condition of employment in or transfer to jobs when
(a) neither standard is shown to be significantly related to successful job performance,
(b) both requirements operate to disqualify Negroes at a substantially higher rate than white applicants, and
(c) the jobs in question formerly had been filled only by white employees as part of a longstanding practice of giving preference to whites."
The article says that the IQ tests required by this VC firm are illegal, on account of this ruling.
But we cannot know that, as we don't know the facts of this particular situation. IANAL, but my reading of the opinion is that, for this case to apply, the following three conditions must hold:
1. The firm can't show IQ test scores are significantly correlated with job performance, and
2. The firm is rejecting candidates from one or more protected groups at a higher rate than the overall applicant pool, and
3. The firm must have been disproportionately hiring from a majority group.
Have I misinterpreted the ruling?
I’m surprised it’s not more common in the U.S.
IQ testing provides an exceptionally efficient means by which companies can find the best candidates. It is the reality of life that some people are smarter than others. Pretending otherwise does no one any good. To catch those who have a low IQ, Denmark has an extremely extensive social security system. They want companies to thrive here, but the high taxes ensure those who don't do well in a capitalist system also live decent lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
MBTI’s Wikipedia page says it’s “criticized as pseudoscience and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in the field. The indicator exhibits significant scientific (psychometric) deficiencies”, so I think hoping for formal studies by anyone other than the company that hypes it is unlikely
It is very well-studied in psychology. To say that most academic researchers don't "endorse" it is silly— it's not the job of a researcher to endorse a particular survey instrument, but rather to dispassionately study the mind using the best instruments available. That said, the Big-5 personality scale is certainly a more standard survey instrument in psychology, and it really doesn't matter too much which survey instrument you use, because they all correlate together. They just differ upon where you draw the coordinate axes in the space of personality; but they're all measuring essentially the same space of personality.
One day they wanted to try out an IQ test. 40 questions in 20 minutes. Timer starts when you click a button. I was fed up.
Poked around the testing site and it was an SPA, all JS. Poked through the network calls, saw an odd base64 payload. Decoded it and saw a JS object with "cyphertext", "iv", and some other field I don't recall.
I went looking through the JS sources and found a "decrypt" function. Added a breakpoint before it returned and reloaded the page. Had all the questions without starting the timer.
Took my sweet time going through each question. Compiled all the answers and started the timer. I still got 2 of the 40 questions wrong.
A couple of days later my manager sets up a meeting with me. I assumed they caught wind of what I did. I'm ready to get defensive and say how wrong this is.
My manager starts the meeting congratulating me! My results are within top 2 percentile. That, and a previous big 5 result tells them I have a bright future in the company and they want my input in all big projects going forward.
I went from being the random junior, to everyone in management thinking I'm the next Carmack.
I didn't know how to feel about it. Is it morally wrong?
It taught me a lesson of how biased we are. How much we need to be told how to feel about others. I was the same person, yet a number changed everyone's perception of me.
I don't ever want to take a real IQ test. I don't know how I might start behaving differently if I see a number associated with my "intelligence".
Left that company a few months later and told them about it. They were a bit angry but I hope they learned a lesson in how harmful biased tests can be.
(cries on his PhD in physics and his engineering degree)
Seriously these tests are terrible. My company for a fleeting moment decided to have applicants go though some psychological tests, I was lucky to go through them.
Ended up as a lonely shy but extrovert psychopat with great sense of humor and leadership (or something like this) and I asked how this weird score will impact my hiring. The HR gal just rolled her eyes and filed my results, then checked the last box in the process.
It might not be very indicative of the expected performance of the applicant, but does that matter? If an employer wants to try me on remembering English regents or inverting a tree on a whiteboard there isn’t much I can do about it except maybe walk out ands/or tell others about my bad experience interviewing.
Why would there even be a law (or backlash) against IQ tests? Are they seen as discriminatory?
If you capture the strategic parts gamers will figure out new ways to solve the puzzles.
A stupid idea I just had that doesn't fit the criteria at all: A turn based multiplayer game where you write one line of code at a time and vote on the previous line. The 1 point task: The worse player gets 1 point, the next 2, if there are 6 players the nr 1 gets 6 points. If you quit and the program doesn't work the worse player gets -6, next -5 etc Comments are allowed but nothing can be removed.
Even if you manage to find an online IQ test which is not a scam focused on getting your phone number and other data, the quality is lacking.
If you just want the result for yourself test.mensa.no is pretty good and not a scam.
Precisely because, as you said, "it doesn't work." There's not a good amount of evidence that IQ tests (which vary wildly, BTW) are a valid measure of cognitive ability or an indicator of aptitude toward a task (perhaps other than mental arithmetic or something). It only causes people who may be bad at rotating shapes in their mind or whatever to be discriminated against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
Look at the figures in the "Cognitive ability testing" section -- see how strong those correlations are across the disparate fields of Classics, Math, and Music!
In other words, there is a mountain of evidence that IQ tests correlate with an extraordinarily broad range of aptitudes in daily life, and especially with job performance. IQ is the single most important psychometric correlate with job performance and income of any out there; it's a much stronger signal than race, gender, birthplace, or personality for instance:
"Research indicates that tests of g are the best single predictors of job performance, with an average validity coefficient of .55 across several meta-analyses of studies based on supervisor ratings and job samples."
For a summary of the mountain of research done in the field, I recommend “Intelligence: All That Matters” by Stuart Ritchie:
> There is a strange disconnect between the scientific consensus and the public mind on intelligence testing. Just mention IQ testing in polite company, and you'll sternly be informed that IQ tests don't measure anything "real", and only reflect how good you are at doing IQ tests; that they ignore important traits like "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences"; and that those who are interested in IQ testing must be elitists, or maybe something more sinister.
> Yet the scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world's top scientific journals.
> This book will offer an entertaining introduction to the state of the art in intelligence and IQ, and will show how we have arrived at what we know from a century's research. It will engage head-on with many of the criticisms of IQ testing by describing the latest high-quality scientific research, but will not be a simple point-by-point rebuttal: it will make a positive case for IQ research, focusing on the potential benefits for society that a better understanding of intelligence can bring.
Good thing is how that will create opportunity for next generation of IQ tests that are really focused on human intelligence... but as AI improves that slice of the pie that's valid may get really narrow in a weird and niche way. and so we may end up doing these strange tests that are really bizarre but somehow the data says they reflect our innate human intelligence.
It's a sneaky way of administering an IQ test but it is essentially what this industry is doing.
> The CARS section is similar to verbal reasoning sections providing passages with questions testing reading comprehension. The 500-600 word passages can cover topics ranging from the social sciences to the humanities, sometimes presenting in a convoluted or biased manner requiring the reader to consider what is being written from multiple perspectives.[25] The passages are designed to discuss topics that are unfamiliar to the reader, but success in this section requires strictly using information from the passage without using previously known knowledge.[
But what makes an IQ test is the theory that all performance on each of these skills correlates together strongly, indicating a single "general intelligence" factor (aka "IQ"). [1] Reading comprehension turns out to be highly correlated with mathematical aptitude, and musical aptitude, etc.
So the main criteria for an IQ test is not how it looks, or how it's structured, but whether it measures knowledge that has been acquired (aka "nurture") or ability to reason about new things. Since this test is measuring reading comprehension on topics that are unfamiliar to the reader, it is measuring the latter, and is likely to have a strong correlation with g, and thus looks like an IQ test.
Plenty of programming screens and interviews involve all sorts of brain puzzlers that are never used in actual programming. Does that mean they are racist too??
An IQ test would be inappropriate for an occupation that does not involve heavy analytical skills, but if that VC firm posting was for some VC analyst and not a janitor, then I don't see any problems with trying to hire workers with high IQs as long as they feel that would be the best for their organization.
Seems to me that preventing IQ tests from being used as a criteria for positions requiring heavy analytical work is discrimination against individuals who can do well on IQ tests.
It disgusts me to see anybody "apologize" for this. It's like as soon as they get accused of being "un-inclusive" they start "apologizing" before some imaginary mob bursts in and hurts their social media rankings. This is so spineless.
Presumably, those people could prove their worth through other methods, ideally one closely related to job at hand. If they can't do that, then maybe the IQ test was a bad proxy.
> Does that mean they are racist too??
Also probably yes, but I don't want to argue that.
I'm not saying not to test using other methods too.
People usually can be evaluated on their analytic skills through other means that are more conversational and interrogatory, which in turn also assess soft-skills, which contrary to McNamara Fallacy adherents, are in truly short supply here in techville.
It's not measuring aptitude of test taking, it's measuring your ability to detect and apply patterns.
If you train yourself to get better at seeing patterns of dots in boxes, that doesn’t generalize nearly as well as a muscle does. It doesn’t make you a better chess player. There’s plenty of science to back this up.
At large, IQ tests in recruiting are training applicants to be good at IQ tests.
All of this for a job with a huge degree of repeatability, which doesn't require a high iq.
There's a lot more to diversity and civil rights than just race, although racism is very visible.
> Seems to me that preventing IQ tests from being used as a criteria for positions requiring heavy analytical work is discrimination against individuals who can do well on IQ tests.
Some people just aren't test takers. Anxiety, ADHD, neurodiversity in general for example. Or maybe they came from a place that didn't teach standardized tests, or is taking the test in a non-native language. Blind. Who knows. Someone could be a genius but suck at test taking.
Why should an IQ test be a job requirement anyways? Why not an EQ test? Does an IQ test discriminate against high EQ people? It's a straw man argument.
> It disgusts me to see anybody "apologize" for this. It's like as soon as they get accused of being "un-inclusive" they start "apologizing" before some imaginary mob bursts in and hurts their social media rankings. This is so spineless.
I wonder if there's a middle ground where someone else's success isn't seen as taking away another person's. That would make for less hostile rhetoric on both sides of your argument.
There can be a lot of social and family support/pressure to get good grades, attend good schools, and not everyone gets the right people surrounding them to create those types of opportunities. And checking all the right boxes still doesn't make someone entitled to a special set of job opportunities. At least not in the US. China, maybe so. Other countries maybe different too.
> non-native language. Blind
If we're being brutally honest here, this makes the test a good filter if only for this reason. These are not advantageous traits. All else being equal, a sensible employer ought to prefer the candidate without these ... 'neurodivergences'.
If diversity is such a boon for business, I'm sure the company next door with less discriminating recruitment policies will be glad to take them on board...
It's not the job of a faceless entity to decide on what criteria I should hire someone. If I value EQ I should very well be able to do a test for EQ.
IQ tests sound perfectly reasonable and don't discriminate anymore than any other mental gimmick is requested in interviews today.