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There is a burgeoning culture of “automatic assessments” (and startups racing to develop and sell them to other startups) that mirrors the old aptitude tests thwt HR firms used to do when screening candidates for, say… accounting jobs (back before computers were a thing).

HR people love them because it saves them time and thins out the herd, some tech companies believe it sets up a minimum threshold to cull out inexperienced candidates, and, let’s be frank, many hiring managers are too lazy (or powerless) to either understand how these things work or fight the VP who’s been told “spend X and save X times 1000 in hiring the wrong people”, because who designs these things pairs them with a massively advantageous risk/savings model.

And most orgs will just spend the money on these tests instead of hiring people properly.

It’s like Hackerrank and their zillions of wannabes, who’ve spawned an entire subculture of cheats and people who can code just barely enough to solve canned problems, instead of actually understanding what the computer is doing.

(I politely back down from anything that even resembles something like this - like the old Google quiz interviews - because it tells me a lot about how the hiring process works and how much of a meat puppet HR would like you to be in that kind of company.)




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