Job mismatch and early career success
nber.org
nber.org
So... the system works?
At least within the very constrained universe of what the Air Force is doing/testing for?
I find it kinda sad, honestly. But these are aggregated statistics, I still think people can overcome their perceived limitations, I'm certain some of the underqualified folks are the ones that drag that curve up a lot.
At least they aren't using engagement as a core part of the rating like many companies do - you can outperform on metrics and still be rated low because of your intangible and subjective "engagement".
Can someone explain this apparent contradiction, specifically in the context of the Air Force/military?
Monsieur Bouvier was a high school French teacher who was one time the only teacher with a PhD in my school district. He knew a lot about pedagogy and evaluation and certainly French but being in his classroom I think he lacked "soft skills" and was not good at dealing with bullshit which is a lot of what the teacher job entails.
He got promoted to assistant principal on the basis of his credentials and put in charge of gifted and talented programs, I think the honors program succeeded precisely because people above him bypassed his authority and overruled him quite often. He was not really a good leader or manager -- as assistant principal he got to do some of what he was good at but he had to do more of dealing with the bullshit that the first and second tier couldn't deal with.
My school had Roy Downton as principal for the longest time and he was really great at the job and hard to replace. There was a lot of jockeying for the position and Bouvier lost out and Mr. Adamankos finally won. I think Boivier's credentials got him a certain advantage in promotion but fortunely he didn't get promoted too far beyond his competence.
many people are immune to basic motivation tactics but im surprised how many of my peers i see influenced by reviews which seem mostly motivational, and occasionally political, to me
Community involvement is a significant factor on both enlisted and officer performance reports. Gotta fill that section in no matter what, and if your section is poor it drags your overall score down.
However, promotion testing is purely knowledge and skill based. A good test taker can overcome the weight of lower performance report scores.
Just my opinion, though.
You also have to look at the culture of the place- and although that varies from base to base, whether or not someone is more or less qualified may be completely irrelevant. Cultural fit is very important, for example. Favoritism may be rampant, just like any other workplace. High performers who concentrate solely on the relevant tasks have less time to make the rounds around the office, playing petty politics, just like anywhere.
Was this entire study based on real data or a simulation?
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.
I have no idea why they did this, I guess that was the idea of a hiring process at the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Empirical observation trumps axiomatic derivation in this case.
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... .
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.
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"
That's just one specific IQ test, Raven's Progressive Matrices.
> 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"
From https://www.officialasvab.com/applicants/faqs/ :
> there is only one exam, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB for short. The ASVAB has 10 tests. Your scores from four of the tests—Word Knowledge (WK), Paragraph Comprehension (PC), Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), and Mathematics Knowledge (MK)—are combined to compute your score on what is referred to as the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). Scores on the AFQT are used to determine your eligibility for enlistment in the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps. Scores on all of the ASVAB tests are used to determine the best job for you in the military.
You have to clear an IQ threshold to be eligible to enlist at all. Only after you're smart enough to be in the army will they consider which jobs you might do relatively better in.
Not OP but thank you, now I finally know what that test that I took as a kid is called!
Depending on how young you were, maybe they weight it more toward the abstract patterns, because no kid isn’t going to have a fully developed vocabulary.
My mother is an obstetrician, and something that has always bothered her is that American hospitals have women lie on their backs to give birth. This is not a natural position, it's not comfortable for the women, and it can make it more difficult to get the baby out.
So why do we do it?
The answer is that, a long time ago, doctors who assumed that that was the correct way to give birth developed a set of standard measurements that determine what doctors today think of how far into the labor process a woman is. These measurements are only valid for a woman lying on her back - they will change if she shifts positions. They would have to be redone and revalidated for a woman in a natural delivery position. And nobody wants to do that.
The SAT correlates as well with any given IQ test as other, "official" IQ tests do. It is an IQ test. It serves all of the purposes that IQ tests serve, and it cannot serve any purpose that they can't.
It is more accurate than some very standard "accepted IQ tests" such as Draw-a-Man. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-a-Person_test )
But it's important to some people not to call it an IQ test. Try not to be one of those people.
Draw-a-Person basically isn't an IQ test at all, so I don't see how that comparison clears anything up.
This is false. In particular:
> it's straightforwardly trainable
No, it isn't. There is an extensive literature on SAT prep, finding that it's worth a couple of points on the test. It is widely described as being trainable, but the opposite was always a design goal, and historically that goal was achieved very well.
You might note that the Raven's matrices are infamous for huge training effects; that test relies on the testee having never seen it before. The SAT doesn't.
> culturally loaded
This claim is true, but nobody claims that IQ tests are insulated from being culturally loaded. The purpose of Raven's is to be a culture-free test. Wechsler makes no such pretense.
> samples only math, processing speed, and verbal reasoning
I'm not sure what you're saying here.
> and tracks prior educational experience as much as it does aptitude.
And this one is false. The point of the SAT is to test only low-level material so that you can be confident the entire test-taking population has been exposed to the material. Aptitude has a very large influence on SAT score; prior education has a negligible influence.
(Prior education will have a larger influence if the population you're investigating includes a lot of people with no education, the kind of people who left school after or before kindergarten. But that scenario isn't relevant to... pretty much any question about the SAT.)
> Draw-a-Person basically isn't an IQ test at all, so I don't see how that comparison clears anything up.
It is an IQ test by the standard you defined: it holds itself out as being "an IQ test", and it is used by researchers to study the intelligence of testees. Did you want to use a different definition?
They don't differ in psychometric properties from the general SAT, but they do require more education before they make sense.
Klarna's seemed like the most proper IQ test although it had at least one question that was wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
basically "people rise to the level of their own incompetence"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle#The_Peter_Prin...
Did Captain Obvious wrote this working paper or all NBER research is like this?
Too under qualified is still a continuous train wreck…
But sometimes, those mismatches lead us to discover what we truly love.
Every detour can be a learning opportunity.