Will Recognizing Abstract Patterns Get You EMPLOYED?
As someone who’s interested in working in the business world, I’ve been searching for an internship to fill my U2 summer plans. Most of these internships are extremely competitive. There are only a handful of open positions for the hundreds, if not thousands, of students who apply. The recruiters will filter candidates based on GPA, relevant experiences, resume and cover letter. However, after this first round of filtering, many companies will require the rest of the applicants to complete various assessment tests to further weed out the applicants who don’t have the required “technical abilities”.
I was quite surprised by these assessment tests because I’ve never done any for my previous job applications. Many questions popped into my head. Do my scores on these tests make or break my chances? How well do I have to perform to “pass”? What are these tests even trying to measure? Do they actually predict job performance or are they just used as an artificial factor for recruiters to narrow down their list of applicants?
I’ve done numerous versions of these tests like decision making, problem solving, numerical reasoning and inductive reasoning. The one I want to focus on is inductive reasoning. This is a timed test (18 questions in 15 minutes from what I remember). Each question consists of a series of patterns containing various shapes and colours and the test taker has to determine which answer completes the sequence. Here’s an example. Try it and see if you can figure it out!
For this question, I realized that the dark blocks of the inner square represent where the bigger shapes on the outside should be located. Then I noticed how the bigger outside shapes must alternate between “both white” and “both black. Based on these 2 assumptions, the answer must be “B”. I did not even consider whether or not the shape of the “outer shapes” made a difference. This reasoning might not be very obvious to people who are looking at this for the first time. That’s exactly how I felt when I took my first and second inductive reasoning test. I had no clue what I was doing. However when I took the test for the third time for yet another application, something magically clicked and I instantly knew how to analyze the patterns.
Although I’m not sure how high an applicant must score to “pass” the test, I can tell you (from experience) that this test does in fact make or break your chances because the first and second tests (poor results) earned me rejection letters while the third test (successful result) earned me an interview. The fact that the test can produce different results based on amount of exposure and practice probably confounds the results and makes it an unreliable predictor of job performance. After all, if these results are supposed to be accurate and reliable, you probably don’t want to give an interview to someone who completely flunked his first two attempts.
