Comment by mrkeen
6 hours ago
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)
Are you failing because of the dot test or because of the personality test?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aren’t soft skills much more important than hard skills when it comes to building a team?
> 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?
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...
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.
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)
Time and motion study neurodivergent slave class optimisation.
> 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.
Have a computer take your personality test is dystopian