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San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test

sfgate.com

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Re: San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test

#4
IQ tests aren't illegal by themselves, but it's up to the employer to show that IQ is an important part of the job. E.g, leetcode tests in FAANG interviews are defacto IQ tests since interviewers are told to evaluate the candidate for "general cognitive ability" when asking leetcode questions, but they are still used for FAANG interviews because the companies realized that they correlate to job performance. I don't know of any formal MBTI studies related to engineers, but my anecdotal data suggests that xNTx MBTIs are disproportionately present in SV. So there might be a useful reason to ask about MBTI in an interview, but it would be bad to decline a candidate based on their MBTI unless there was hard data suggesting it affected job performance.

Re: San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test

#5
Several big hedge funds require candidates to take the Wonderlic test ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test ) which is essentially an IQ type test (it strongly correlates with “G”). Didn’t seem to be an issue though since pretty much any candidate that got to that stage was fairly book smart and could easily get a good enough score.

Re: San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test

#6
post #4

IQ tests aren't illegal by themselves, but it's up to the employer to show that IQ is an important part of the job. E.g, leetcode tests in FAANG interviews are defacto IQ tests since interviewers are told to evaluate the candidate for "general cognitive ability" when asking leetcode questions, but they are still used for FAANG interviews because the companies realized that they correlate to job performance. I don't k…

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test

#7
"...a 1971 Supreme Court ruling that decreed IQ tests and other tests unrelated to the job to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964..."

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.

Re: San Francisco VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test

#9
post #4

IQ tests aren't illegal by themselves, but it's up to the employer to show that IQ is an important part of the job. E.g, leetcode tests in FAANG interviews are defacto IQ tests since interviewers are told to evaluate the candidate for "general cognitive ability" when asking leetcode questions, but they are still used for FAANG interviews because the companies realized that they correlate to job performance. I don't k…

> formal MBTI studies

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

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