Job Mismatch and Early Career Success

Monsieur Bouvier was a high school French teacher who was one time the only teacher with a PhD in my school district. He knew a lot about pedagogy and evaluation and certainly French but being in his classroom I think he lacked "soft skills" and was not good at dealing with bullshit which is a lot of what the teacher job entails.

He got promoted to assistant principal on the basis of his credentials and put in charge of gifted and talented programs, I think the honors program succeeded precisely because people above him bypassed his authority and overruled him quite often. He was not really a good leader or manager -- as assistant principal he got to do some of what he was good at but he had to do more of dealing with the bullshit that the first and second tier couldn't deal with.

My school had Roy Downton as principal for the longest time and he was really great at the job and hard to replace. There was a lot of jockeying for the position and Bouvier lost out and Mr. Adamankos finally won. I think Boivier's credentials got him a certain advantage in promotion but fortunely he didn't get promoted too far beyond his competence.

many people are immune to basic motivation tactics but im surprised how many of my peers i see influenced by reviews which seem mostly motivational, and occasionally political, to me

The purpose was to see if they could hire university graduates with a minimum of human interviewing effort. They selected from a handful of universities, gave a couple online tests, verified the candidate's identity as the test-taker, then would give out offers sight-unseen.

I was hired this way in 2015. From my perspective, I had taken a couple online tests, then months later had a thirty-minute identity verification call, then a couple months later, was sent a job offer. I thought it was by mistake, so I didn't ask too many questions. I had a thirty-minute call with a hiring manager I otherwise never interacted with, then accepted, flew internationally back to the states to Seattle to start, met him and all my teammates for the first time on my first day of work.

I found the internal documents about this program later on spelunking in the internal wiki.

This was in a group interview for recent university graduates at a very big company. I assume their hiring process was pretty standardized, so there were probably thousands of people taking this test every year in North America.

It's hard to argue that a general IQ test is job related, but they're likely to have a disparate impact on protected classes of people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

I’ve had to take a few. I don’t mind too much. It’s mostly to test if you are WAY below what they expect for the position.

The personality trait tests are also quite common IME.

I have no idea why they did this, I guess that was the idea of a hiring process at the time.