At around 10:05 p.m. on October 4, I quit midway through an assessment from a potential employer. It was the worst one I’d encountered yet. After being worn down by the rounds of AI-generated images, arranging shapes in squares to complete patterns, and comparing fractions, I finally broke during the last test.
The specific task that broke me was a lock that I had to open by timing my click as a number spun around a knob. Each number in the code moved differently – some slow, some fast, some speeding up halfway around the knob – and there were 15 digits in the code. If you clicked at the wrong point in a rotation, the program sent you back to the start.
I tried four times. Then I gave up.
The game wasn’t worth the energy, the toll on my emotions or the sleep I was sacrificing to complete it. So I clicked “give up,” submitted my assessment, and received a lovely email with my results. Apparently, I am above average in Emotion Perception and Inductive Reasoning and below average in Persistent Effort (I can’t blame them for that one), Focused Attention, and Cognitive Ability. Thanks, generic multinational energy firm. I think your HR department lacks respect for my time and effort.
In my job search, I’ve come across several companies, from consulting to sellers of Consumer Packaged Goods, that send me a link to a similar “assessment” or “game” to complete before going forward in the process. They’re not virtual interviews (which are almost always in the same format and run by HireVue, oddly enough), but a series of exercises ranging from clicking my mouse as fast as I can, to pattern matching, to picking the emotion someone is feeling from an AI-generated image.
One time, the people whose emotions I was supposed to identify had blue skin.
As you might be able to guess from what I’ve written so far, I think these assessments are a load of horse shit. Lazy companies use them to take advantage of job seekers. They require our time and effort to screen ourselves out, just so they can save pennies on the labor of glancing at each resume for 30 seconds – before throwing out half of our applications anyway.
It makes sense on their part (somewhat). Why spend money paying your workers to sort through resumes and pretend to give everyone an equal chance, when you could instead waste a prospective employee’s time for free? The strategy gets bonus points for providing a seemingly-unbiased reason to reject people, all while doing a meta-test of the prospective employee’s willingness to chase a carrot for even a chance of being considered by these ‘gracious’ employers.
You might be wondering why I continue to take these assessments despite my frustrations. The answer is simple: I need a job. I’ve completed about five in the past month, and I only quit halfway through one of them.
Also, most companies don’t spell out their hiring process. I never know if the job I’m applying for will have a single interview, a game, a HireVue or even seven rounds of interviews until I’ve already submitted my application and gotten past the first screen.
Some companies do it right, though. They respect your time enough to either make it quick or make sure the assessment is a good test of your skills and company fit. So far, I’ve had one potential employer use Pymetrics, a third-party tool for their assessment. It doesn’t sound any better so far, but what if I told you that the assessment is reusable for other companies that ask for the same one? It’s slightly less bad!
The other assessment I respected is the one I did for Ovative Group. They sent me a link to a Google Sheets file and a list of questions about the data and told me to go at it. It certainly felt like a more accurate tool to assess how I would do as a marketing analyst than a game that asks me to click “p” if the arrow in the middle is pointing left and “q” if it’s pointing right.
In fact, most of these games simply have nothing to do with the adequacy of a candidate. While I could talk about marketing strategies all day, I’m average at best on tests of reflexes. I played Pokémon growing up, not Call of Duty; my clicking skills are for accuracy, not speed. Tests like that, with no relation to the tasks of the job, make me question the inclusivity of these assessments. If someone with nerve damage played it, they would have no chance. I don’t think that’s intentional on the company’s part, but it’s just another oversight of how standardized corporate policies discount the experiences of people with disabilities.
So what should be done instead? I think hiring departments should take a good look at the true purpose of these assessments and evaluate whether they are fulfilling or failing to meet their intended goals. If you want to attract new college grads who would do anything for a demanding but high paying job, maybe an assessment will screen out those who are better suited for a more equal work-life balance. But if you want employees who are creative, prioritize their impact and value the company’s time, then maybe you should value the applicants’ time too.
Thumbnail graphic by Jessica Chen / North by Northwestern.