It's not technically illegal, just legally perilous. Some companies do it, but they're companies that require a whole lot of other qualifications - "we only hire from Harvard and Yale" or "applicants must have ten years managing at least 150 employees".
I think the situation is basically that it’s allowed, but employers have to jump through probably more hoops than they should be required to to prove it’s fair. The Supreme Court ruled in 1971 in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that Duke Power Co. had high school graduation and IQ test requirements for all but the lowest-level positions, the IQ requirement having been added after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and they were made to stop directly discriminating against black applicants. The court looked at promotion records and decided that the requirements weren’t really predictive of anything and served mainly to allow them to continue discriminating against black applicants, and decided that the Civil Rights Act prohibited general intelligence tests, so employers either have to prove that such tests are predictive of job success, or only use tests that are written to test job-specific abilities.
I don’t know where to find the data used in that case, but my understanding is that intelligence tests have been shown to be broadly predictive of job performance, more so than any tests written to test only “job-related” skills; intuitively, it’s often better to hire someone who can more easily learn new things than to hire someone who already has some amount of experience but has difficulty learning new skills, drawing inferences, and dealing with unexpected situations. So if you’re hiring someone, and you have two otherwise equal applicants, and one scores better on an intelligence test, it makes sense that you’d be better off hiring the one who scored higher, but this is prohibited by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Rights Act.
Banning employers from using an effective method to choose who to hire necessarily causes economic efficiency. It’s fascinating to think about how much; a large part of why companies like to hire from top universities is that that’s where the smart students are. A large part of why so many companies are requiring college degrees for jobs that didn‘t previously require them is that it’s an effective form of cognitive selection; as more and more students go to college, fewer high-IQ students don’t go to college, and the IQ gap between those who do and those who don’t grows. I think eventually someone’s going to realize it’s possible to hire students straight out of high school on the basis of test scores and provide them with all the necessary training, skipping the whole process of making them spend $250,000 and four years of their lives experimenting with drugs and getting shwasted.
>I think the situation is basically that it’s allowed, but employers have to jump through probably more hoops than they should be required to to prove it’s fair.
Actually, no, you're misunderstanding the key to Griggs. It doesn't matter if the test is fair if the outcome is discriminatory.
It'd actually be pretty safe to do it in the tech industry.
The DoJ and activists are only interested in suing companies where a) it's difficult to rate individual performance and b) judges think that "anyone can do that job"
