Does Klarna still do the IQ test as part of their hiring process?
replies(11):
His assumption is surely, "Relax, what's going to happen, the cable won't break!".
I thought that IQ test was screening test, pre-phone interview. But no, they had me redo it at the onsite interview too. The funny part was the onsite test had the exact same questions as pre-phone interview.
edit: typo
I remember doing it too. I was at work in a meeting and they have instructions saying something to the tune of finding a quiet place and all of that, but my thoughts were if they are serious about this, then solving these abstract problems is something I'll have to be able to do while under pressure or under the heat of conversation.
Long story short anyway, I'm not intelligent enough to work there I guess, so good thing they used that test to screen me out and make sure I knew. It does have a little bit of merit with the very quick no versus the long, drawn out no. I recently interviewed at a great company, 4 1-1 interviews, a presentation/demo I had to make to present to 7 other people, etc. and I think another interview after that and I'm just over it.
It had questions like "are you afraid of water", "have you showered in the last three weeks", "have you felt more aggressive lately"...
It's all about good engineering practice and architecture.
That said, I'm also pro-nuclear.
Quickly why they don't work:
You create a huge chain correlational assumptions. First that visual-spatial tasks of this kind predict performance on visual tasks. 2. That performance on visual tasks predict general intelligence (whatever that is). 3. That this notion of general intelligence (which is usually and arbitrarily defined not to include social skills) actually correlates with the tasks that you think the person will be performing, and finally that your idea of what the role has an impact on the company. Of course it is completely absurd, what they are selling is snake oil, plain and simple.
The remedy I recommend is simple, talk to the person - do it and you will be able to tell within 5 minutes.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/16749/why-does-r...
When I joined Klarna in 2011, the test was so easy that I joked I could score full marks on it even if I was hungover with no sleep. There was one question on the test that actually had 2 correct answers depending on what logic you applied. This was actually a real issue when recruiting, because there was a hard cut-off to make it into the engineering department, and several times I had to ask "what was their answer on question 12?"
It caused quite a bit of commotion at HR to change the official test scoring to 2 correct answers for that question.
Now the test is like a million times harder and your score at the end is between 0-10 and you have no idea how many questions you actually answered correctly. I would be very interested to know the "true" answers of these new tests to understand what kind of crazy logic you need to apply to get every question right. I'm almost certain it would take me longer to understand the answer than the time you have to do the test.
And most of the time it's not even proper IQ-test but only Raven Matrice test + maybe quick math tests.
Funny thing was that I did very good (apparently according to the HR person) on one of them, but did horrible enough they didn't even call back on the second test.
grids my gear why this is still a common practice in Sweden. HR in Sweden seems to be about one or two decades behind rest of the world in their efficiency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personal...
The thing is, I really needed that job... ended up going to another job that offered me a very low salary (I had no visa in the country , so was looking for a sponsor, which makes things a lot harder) and the company went bankrupt within a few months!
Anyway, I still got the visa, and then, with a few months to find another job with more peace of mind, I eventually got much nicer job, paying a lot more! But I still dread the though of doing an IQ test, despite my years of experience indicating I am more competent than average, at least.
The hiring company would send your answer sheet and work sheets off to the company to analyze and provide a score.
Anyone else remember those?
I lost so many great candidates that would be great hires to my teams at Klarna to that stupid test.
There may not be an explicit "IQ" portion to the process, or a hard number, but they are absolutely filtering on intelligence. An uncomfortable aspect of our society that I'm both surprised and not surprised doesn't get talked about much.
My guess: each time a strand within the cable broke the cable stretched a little and the brake triggered.
Five years ago a company was hired to maintain the cable car. They took one look at the state of it, wrote to the operator (the town council) saying it needed to be shut down and exited the contract. It was an accident waiting to happen long before the brake fiasco.
There is a strong correlation between IQ and professional achievement whether you want to believe it or not.
First, if you're just hiring assistants from the Philippines they could just have someone else take the test or get around it some other way.
Second, you have no good data to support this hiring practice. You're free to use it, but it's no better than just hiring a random person from your pool of applicants. You might as well screen based on their favorite color too to just make up filtering criteria.