I hope you'll understand I'm not arguing against you. I can totally understand the adversity, and by all means people can easily use it as a bias, but it merely gauges how good at "if X then Y" one is, which in turn reflects on how clear the job at hand should be. It's not about being smart/er than others, it should be just one datapoint in a sea of tens of datapoints in the search for "a good fit". And all you're looking for are red-flags, not as many checked checkboxes. Then again, any tool can be misused. Point taken.
IQ in particular is a measure of very specific trainable skills. Particularly the harder part of IQ tests are extremely prone to cognitive bias by the authors though, where they start measuring neurotypicality rather than problem solving ability.
The problem is that these tests do not sell themselves as "just one data point", and even if they did, you'd have to do so many other things to compensate for the shortcomings of standardized IQ tests, they're really not worth doing in the first place.
IMO the best way to assess fit is to ask someone to handle a hypothetical, or to ask for previous experiences fitting a problem or situation.
Of course get to know the candidate as much as possible before hiring, but if you had to pick your candidate based on a single number, you truly don't think IQ isn't way up there as one of the more usefully discriminating ones?
I don't think anyone can doubt that it's likely to be predictive of success. There are sheafs of papers on that: e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/, though that paper also discusses confounding factors. My bigger worry is that I can't imagine any of our candidates assenting to an IQ test (outside of Scandinavia where it sounds like it's the norm).
You used the IQ test as an example of how your needs are fairly basic. Is it possible that your needs are not basic, and you may in fact expect high standards of your employer?
I mentioned the IQ test because those employers couldn't stop talking about fitting in. Without tests, fitting in = we like you, we like you not, where WE can be very different today than tomorrow. Applying for the same position after knowing that the hiring manager was replaced is not unheard of.
I definitely do NOT want tests of ANY kind to be the norm, but if I'm forced to find a "fit", then I try to take myself out of the picture and balance the team instead. I respectfully reject the idea that this is similar to "measuring skulls" (a comment in the thread).
Thanks for pointing that out. Hopefully I made myself clearer now.
