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How has plum.io worked out for you? What kinds of things does it test candidates for? I admit, from the front page: my impression is that it's less like Moneyball for hiring and more like Dwarf Fortress.


Ha, that's funny.

The best way to use the test is to screen candidates to find the top 5 or so. Let's so you get 200 resumes. Instead of sorting through them all, you can have the applicants take the Plum.io test. Once the results come in, you'll have the candidates ranked from top to bottom. You don't have to make hiring decisions based on the result, but you can use it to narrow the five or ten you want to interview. That's the best use I've seen so far. It also helps to weed out people that have fluff on their resume. You'll know right away how intelligent they are from an IQ perspective and also how hard they work, in addition to other personality traits that will be useful.


You don't have to make hiring decisions based on the result, but you can use it to narrow the five or ten you want to interview.

It may or may not be wise to reject 95% of your applicants out of hand based on a psychological test [1], but it is certainly a "hiring decision". Don't apply a selection criterion, then try to tell yourself that you didn't.

You'll know right away how intelligent they are from an IQ perspective and also how hard they work, in addition to other personality traits that will be useful.

Yes, personality traits such as "willingness to jump through hoops, just to land an interview with the sort of boss who will ignore one's sales pitch and track record in favor of dubiously-relevant psychological tests." You've set up a very effective screen for this trait.

At least you do this up-front. I had a CEO spring a psychological test on me in a final-round senior-engineering interview, wasting more than a day of my time, not to mention his company's time. Absurdism at its finest: You go in prepared to talk about the business and how you might be able to use your existing technical expertise to score short-, medium-, and long-term wins in performance and revenue, and suddenly your high-school guidance counselor shows up.

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[1] Ranked "top to bottom", no less. That is disturbing. I would quote Mr. Spock and say that this phrase "reflects two-dimensional thinking", but it doesn't even get up to two dimensions.




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