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Comment by bradly | Hacker News Reader

> One company used an IQ test

This is interesting. I haven't had that one yet, but last week I had an application with a "personality" test that asked whether I tend to vote for left-leaning candidates or right-leaning candidates. This company was in the healthcare space.

GitHub asking for approval for AI to review my resume was a bit of a beat too. I did not give permission, and it definitely left me feeling at a disadvantage to other candidates.

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>last week I had an application with a "personality" test that asked whether I tend to vote for left-leaning candidates or right-leaning candidates.

That should be all kinds of illegal already.

And "personality tests" in general should be made illegal too.

Asking which kind of politicians you vote for is pretty obviously about discriminating. But I'm not surprised that this is happening in health care because that space is highly politicized in the US and strong right wingers are likely to have moral objections to several medical procedures. Strong left wingers are likely to have moral objections to the American medical system's notoriously ruthless business practices. In other words, they probably want people who don't have particularly strong political views.

Sadly, political affiliation and political belief are not protected classes under US civil rights law so employers can legally discriminate on this basis. This is actually a big part of why the American political system is so dominated by corporate interests because many people are terrified of hurting their career prospects if they participate in the political process.

>Sadly, political affiliation and political belief are not protected classes under US civil rights law so employers can legally discriminate on this basis.

Really? This blows my mind! So a company could say "We're not hiring democrats or republicans" or something openly?

I don't know where I found it, but I saw a job ad for a dev role that asked for an MBTI test first (it's about personality types thing like INFJ INFP etc).

Asking for this in a job for coding was... something else. And I thought leetcode was all I had to study

At that point they may as well ask for your horoscope chart and a scan of your palm.

Why not just go all the way and ask for your star sign?

I feel like coding exercises are nearly already IQ tests and it’d be simpler to just IQ test than have to try to come up with unique coding problems.

I thought IQ tests were illegal?

It has to technically be an aptitude test, but they really toe the line. Vista Equity, for instance, requires all their companies to use the CCAT in hiring: https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/ccat-prep

I mean, they could probably get sued for that. The test itself says it measures general intelligence.

This is the test I was given:

https://github.com/rubynor/bigfive-web

https://ipip.ori.org/AlphabeticalItemList.htm

Search for politics, sex, god, religion to see some of the questions.

… Are you sure you were applying for a job, and not, er, Scientology?

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