Okay, the conversation probably went in a wrong direction. Let's change pace:

1) Do you, personally, write code? If yes, that's a good thing.

2) You probably know that each employee is like a mini-founder. (If the number of total employees is small, then they could really be a founder.) It doesn't take a smart person to found a successful business, but rather hard work and dedication. People can do really, really well on an IQ test and have no dedication, or they can bomb the IQ test and have so much dedication that they make up for it. Therefore, if the IQ test doesn't have any correlation to how good an employee is, you shouldn't use it to gauge anything.

3) At the company I work at, we've put together a programming test. It's difficult and it grills you hard. If you get a 60/160 we'll still consider you (I got around 60% two years ago). The test is followed by every developer in the company spending time with the interviewee, asking them questions. Then the interviewee is asked to go to the white board and do a programming problem that we give him verbally, with no use of an editor or compiler. How he can react to a the stressful situation of being asked to solve a hard problem in front of total strangers says loads about him. But possibly the most important part is that at the end of the day, the decision for hire or no hire is made from a gut instinct by all developers. That's just how humans work, and it does work.

The programming test weeds out all non-hackers. We call each semi-promising person in, sit them in a room for an hour and leave them with the test. At the end of the hour we score them and if they do horribly, we send them on their way with no hard feelings. It doesn't use up too much of our time, and finding a great person is worth the effort.

You should read http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html also.

Shawn

You could test them on their knowledge of Python. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo

the problem is that i know a lot of really smart people who don't have the self-motivation to produce anything.

Very true. I've always found productive people to be much more useful than smart people.

That's not what he's saying. He said self motivation. So if left to their own devices they'd rather learn more than stick to one task and produce something.

Smart, productive people are what you want when they are being motivated, possibly by others, e.g. boss or peer pressure. I don't care how productive they are if they're not smart and not working in a smart manner.

Asking a few nearly trivial programming or other puzzles in the initial job listing or in a first phone screen really helps for two reasons:

1) it discourages lazy people and resume spammers. Most people want to cut and paste their resume and cover letter and be done. Someone solving your (even simple) puzzle means they might actually be interested in what you are doing.

2) You make sure they aren't completely incompetent jokers. They pass the trivial reject.

Employees? You want people who do as they're told and accept bureaucracy.

Essentially the opposite of a founder.

references are the key to hiring. not the "official" ones. Backdoor or referrals are the best. http://genotropic-orgs.blogspot.com/

No, they don't exist. First of all, your question has no objective test function. Let's put aside that totally fundamental issue. In that case, you would need a test that distinguishes out of a small group of people, and would not have any statistical robustness.

Another way to look at this problem is, if such a test exists, why doesn't everyone use it? The SAT, for example, is very well correlated with intelligence. Most companies don't care about it.

The overarching question, "how do you weed out good people?" is a fundamental challenge of running business. Generally, the advice is to hire people that you personally know are good. If that doesn't work, hire the good people that other good people know, if that doesn't work, maybe you or your pitch is not that good.

You couldn't be more wrong. Such tests do exist, (in fact, as you say, the SAT test has a strong correlation with intelligence) but US corporations have been forbidden to use such tests since the 'Griggs vs. Duke Power' case of 1971. So instead, people doing hiring let college admissions departments do their intelligence testing. If you got into Harvard, that probably says something about your IQ. Of course, this is a much worse situation, and has a lot to do with our current overemphasis on educational credentials, and skyrocketing tuition costs.

It's not that companies don't care about IQ, it's that they are disallowed from using it explicitly.

Actually, hiring assessments do exist and are legal to use. Creating hiring assessments is part of the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology (I believe it's called "Work Psychology" in the UK).

For example, one I/O Psychologist I know has a consulting business, among other things, administering an assessment called the Totalview 2000 to potential hirees for many organizations. It basically works by first testing the personality and several aptitudes of existing top performers for a specific job at an organization to create a benchmark for top-performers, and then comparing the scores of applicants against the benchmark. Unfortunately, as such it is very specific (e.g.: the benchmarks for the same position at two different offices of the same engineering firm differ slightly because said offices take different clients), and only works well if you already have several identified top performers.

I would think twice about working for anyone who gave me an IQ test. Not because I think I'd do badly on it, but because of what it says about that employer.

That they can't hire the right people.

Seriously, employers that are able to "feel" out the right people don't need tests, they'll go with their gut instincts, just like smart business people.

Employers that give IQ tests usually lack this skill and have been burned because of it. I wouldn't want to work at a place that I couldn't trust to find high quality colleagues for me to build with.

(This from a person that naturally scores in the 130's in IQ tests)

You aren't hiring robots. You're hiring people. If you want to be analytical about it, you'll end up hiring the person that tells you what you want to hear the best.

That's not usually the person you want.

That they don't really understand statistics.

You're falling into a trap. Using the vocabulary of statistics does not mean you are thinking statistically. The classic refute, "correlation does not imply causation," applies here. I bet that the top people at top companies have high IQs, this does not mean that a high IQ person makes a top employee.

I'm assuming you're hiring someone at a high level for a small company. Performing an IQ test is too much effort for not enough gain. As a result, you are performing a reverse IQ test. Intelligent people, asked to take an IQ test to join a one person startup, will view it as a waste of their time, and walk away.

Go ahead, ask for SAT score. The most useful aspect of SAT score is in establishing company culture. It seems to me that you want to form a company where employess are the top grads from top universities. This is a classic, and successful model for hiring people. Asking potentital employess to take an IQ test will harm you in the end.

It is you who does not understand statistics. If the 'top people' is a population with a higher than average IQ, then that is probably a useful thing to measure when trying to predict if someone is going to be a top person, even if not all high IQ people are top people and not all top people have high IQ. See Bayes.

Also, if you were coming to this situation with no prior knowledge that IQ means intelligence (that is, imagine that you didn't know what the term IQ means) then you could suspect that its correlation with 'top people' might not be causative. The trouble is, you live and work in the real world, and so have seen smart and not-so-smart people at work. So you have strong reason to suspect that the arrow of causality points from IQ, not towards it.

Intelligence is not the only thing, but it's important and it can be measured.

see my comment below. I'm not planning to ask them to take a full blown iq tests. Just those "iq games" that i find are empirically good in classifying the smart from the non-smart

Good luck to you. Seriously, it already appears that you have made up your mind and don't need any more of our advice. 3 separate people have pointed out why IQ test are a bad idea, yet you are still not convinced. There is not much else to say except good luck.

"I'm sorry but gut feel just doesn't cut it."

Actually, it does. Read Blink: http://www.gladwell.com/blink/ by Malcolm Gladwell for a better idea of this.

I can understand that you're looking for something more cut and dry, but it just doesn't exist. If you've got a problem trusting your instincts, you are probably going to have issues with business decisions in the future as well.

If you want my advice, your first hire should be someone with a track record of making good gut calls, to balance out yourself. That's all I'd look for really - well, besides the need to work well with you. Let him/her hire the people you need, and stick with the analytical stuff that he'll probably hate to do. :-)

Actually, that wasn't the central thesis of Blink at all...

The point of Blink is that gut calls are remarkably accurate when made by an expert with significant pre-existing knowledge and experience in the field. By letting your unconscious make the decision, you can tap into all the knowledge that just doesn't fit in your conscious mind. The brain's basically a massive pattern-recognizer: gut calls are effectively patterns bubbling up into your subconscious that rely on some deeply hidden information.

Gut calls fail terribly when made by people with no expertise in the subject. Blink gave the example of Warren G. Harding: he fit everybody's preconceived notions of what a strong leader should look like, but he was an idiot. George W. Bush is a more modern example. Every time you suffer buyer's remorse after an impulse purchase, it's your gut letting you down.

Every entrepreneur needs to realize that hiring is inherently a low-information process. You don't know anything about the person applying for the job. You can convince yourself by gut call that he's a good fit, but you're as likely to be wrong as right.

The real best way to hire is to have the person work for you for about 3-6 months as a contractor or intern first. Then you go based on your intuition. After 3 months, you've got a stock of information to make a good gut call. You've worked with them daily. But you can't just expect your intuition to magically work in your favor, no matter what.

That's a good point, but even in hiring someone for 3 months, you are turning away others. You need to make the call.

Although Blink does present the dangers of gut calls, you seem to agree there is really no other alternative when it comes to hiring. As an entrepreneur, almost every call you make is made with an element of inconclusiveness. Almost every call is a gut call.

Some gut calls do fail terribly, but when the only way to get the experience and pre-existing knowledge to make the call is to make a few mistakes, you're SOL.

Catch 22, I guess! :-)

The belief that there could be a universal test that maps a person onto some scalar value ranging from "good employee" to "bad employee" says a lot about the belief's holder.

Sorry if that sounds snarky - it's just the way I feel.

it's called probability. It just depends on how you define a good employee and a bad employee and based on that definition, you can prepare a hiring program and test if that program works.

Almost all successful companies have some sort of verifiable hiring programs. facebook has their puzzles as a screener test. It is not a universal test but it helps. If you are able to solve the puzzles, there should be a higher probability that you are a better employee to the company than someone who can't solve the puzzles.

All they need to do is verify if those puzzles are good at screening good hires. If yes, well done then. They've got themselves a great hiring tool.

I'm not asking for the one almighty test that can screen if an employee is good or bad. I'm asking for tests that can help in increasing the probability of hiring good employees. For eg. for a sales job, you absolutely have to do a personality test. If the test indicate that you are introverted and have bad people skills, that you are not likely to be a good hire. Is the personality test a universal test? No, it's not. But it helps.

Here's your fundamental problem. It's a logical fallacy.

You observe that a good employee is likely to have a high IQ. From this, you conclude that a bad employee is likely to have a low IQ, and that a person with a high IQ is likely to be a good employee.

The truth of a proposition does not imply the truth of the converse of the proposition (A - B does not imply B - A) or of the contrapositive of the proposition (A - B does not imply !B - !A).

Further, no company has a verifiable screening program, because they can't evaluate how good the people they screened out were. Suppose a company has a screening program that rejects 90% of candidates completely at random. They then choose their hires from the other 10%, using other means. As long as they get good hires in sufficient quality and quantity, they will believe that the screening program is effective. They have no way of evaluating the people rejected by the screening program.

Do you know what those tests are designed to do? Those tests are designed to narrow 3000 resumes to 300. That's it. After that, you still need to find your person from a pool of 300.

With a hot job market and hiring from (I presume) a no-name startup, you'll be lucky to get 300 hires to sift through. Even more important, those test eliminate some high quality performers. Facebook has a management staff already, and enough money that this is less of a concern.

You on the other hand, would do well to keep every door open. You can't afford to miss that diamond in the rough.

Umm, that's exactly the approach that I wouldn't use an IQ or other standardized test for. If you screen based on IQ or SAT or whatever, you will miss out on good candidates, often candidates who might be critical to the success of your business.

If I have 5 candidates who all have the relevant skills, useful work experience, a strong track record, cultural fit, etc, then I might be willing to differentiate them by test score. If one of them scored 1600 on his SATs and the others were 1200-1300, sure, I'll take the perfect guy. They're probably all qualified anyways, no harm in taking the one who's more qualified.

But I absolutely would not institute a minimum test score and only accept applicants above that level. Because too many of the best programmers I know had SAT scores in the 1200-1400 level, and too many folks with perfect SAT scores turn out to be terrible workers. I wouldn't be selecting for anything relevant to my business, I'd just chop out many candidates who might've been a good choice.

If you want to narrow the pool, include a programming problem with the application. Throw out everything that doesn't compile, run, or give the correct answer - that'll cut out most of the chaff right there. Look through the solutions and only invite the people whose code is clean and elegant for an interview. That'll give you far more relevant results. Plus, the very fact that you have an interesting programming challenge tends to attract top developers. One of the defining characteristics of a top developer is that they like challenge.

Hell, you could even make it a part of the application form and check the results automatically. No manual intervention required.

Because they realize that there's more to happiness than money, especially in a job where you spend at least 1/3 of your waking time?

One of my favorites:

"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"

Unbeknownst to me, there are even answers, on the internet:

http://www.paradiseawaits.com/Tree.html

1) References

2) Experience

3) Accomplishments you can see

There's no evidence one way or another, because there's no clear objective definition of "a good employee."

For some of the jobs I've had, a willingness to think independently and critically -- far more important in a lot of cases than a high IQ -- was an active detriment.

If you can define objectively what makes a person good, you can probably, after a decade or so of research, put together a statistically significant test that will allow you to objectively determine whether a candidate is good or not. That's probably longer than your schedule allows, so you'll have to fudge it.

First, you want people who are analytical and can figure things out. I went to an interview once where the interviewer had a binary clock on the table. It wasn't immediately obvious to me what it was, never having seen one. He left me in the room for a minute while he went to fetch something, and while he was out I figured out what the clock was and that it was off by about a quarter of an hour. Later on in the interview he asked if I had any idea what it was, and I told him that it was off. Apparently I passed the test.

Second, you want people who know their stuff, and who, if they don't know some bit of their stuff, can take a reasonable guess or know where to find the answer. If the candidate submitted a portfolio, you can ask leading questions about the candidate's work: why did you do it this way? What were the tradeoffs if you had done it this other way? You also want to make sure the candidate does something small right there in your office: write code for a merge sort, for instance.

Third, you want someone who fits with your company culture. If you're dominant and want people to follow your instructions, you don't want to hire someone who's always questioning authority. No matter who's right and who's wrong, you'll both have an unpleasant time of it. If you expect people to wear business casual clothes and be punctual, you don't want to hire someone who's the most brilliant programmer in the world but who never gets in before 10:30 am and only owns one shirt with a collar. If the candidate is a poor fit for the culture, the candidate won't perform anywhere near his capacity.

In particular, the difference between a supremely productive programmer and a loafer is often the environment the person is in. Put someone who isn't punctual or a sharp dresser in a culture where he is expected to be at his desk every morning by 8:30 in a jacket and tie, and he'll turn into a loafer out of frustration within a year. No test will identify that.

Dear $DEITY, don't rely on an IQ test! You need to talk to them, give them problems, see how they respond.

It looks like you already knew your smart friends from your dumb friends, so that test wasn't exactly necessary was it?

Don't make them take IQ tests. Honestly, it doesn't reflect well on an employer, especially a small startup. You can usually tell of someone's value and experience by the work they've done, their personality just by talking to them, and their pertinent knowledge just by asking them relevant questions.