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from the boss-wants-to-see-how-you-handle-pressure? dept.
I recently applied for a job in Silicon Valley.
The recruiter had me take a battery of tests that measured my verbal, mathematical and visual aptitude. I'd guess it was a mini-IQ test; it wasn't a mini-MMPI. As a result of the tests I was invited to interview onsite.
At the end of the interview the manager declared that he wanted me to take some tests.
His tests were brain teasers he had downloaded from a random website. The brain teasers had nothing to do with the work I was interviewing for. He seemed to ignore the battery of sophisticated tests I had been subjected to, and to believe that he could do better.
What is the REAL purpose of using brain teasers during an employment interview?
Is it just to make the candidate feel stupid? Are any of these people qualified to interpret the results? Are any of them industrial psychologists? Or is this all about power and control?
Please advise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @08:18PM
Depends who's doing it, but from the description in TFS, and making the (generous) assumption that it's even a good-faith effort to test something about you, it's probably not about how well you solve them, but about your attitude on seeing a new thinking problem. The idea would be that if you go "Puzzle? Cool!" and dig in, you win; if you go "What, use my brain? Hell, no!", you lose. Of course, it's not a very good test, because there's perfectly good reasons a person who happily engages with actual problems that need solved might get pissed off at made-up and irrelevant "brain teasers", but then most interview tricks are stupid -- this one's probably better than average.
(Of course, it could just be a dumb manager who thinks he's smart (goodness knows there are plenty of them) who really believes he can make a better brain test than actual scientists.)