Recruitment can hardly be more broken

I was just tasked with a logical reasoning test for an application (see main image).

I thought this cannot be serious and actually not scored high enough to make HR believe I can do software.

So, that HR people are honestly concluding by some figures, that I was not capable of writing the software that I wrote in the last decade. Better don’t tell it or it might stop running and just dissolve to dust.

Actually the real and logical valid conclusions from that test are:

• I am not good at those logical tests. (What I could improve heavily by simple training and suddenly become more qualified)
• A test saying that a highly experienced and CS-studied developer is not capable to develop software has obviously failed and is flawed.
• HR people trusting in a broken test like that may be not capable of doing HR.

While you can of course question whether I do quality work or whether I am worth my money by doing some kind of qualified test, but that testing approach was just ridiculous.

I had not slept much that day but I do not blame that for not passing the test, but only for not having turned away before even starting it.

The relevance of IQ tests as a measure of intelligence is scientifically heavily questioned. Nonetheless there is an industry of people going much further by pretending, they could predict your abilities and future performance by doing tests like those. This is mostly nonsense and made up just for justifying their pay-check and not being replaced by a dice. Which they could be, if more people find out that they actually not do more than rolling a dice and looking smart while doing so.

Actually this reminds of all those credit checking agencies, which pretend to be able to tell your risk of not being able to pay your rates by what you ate for breakfast on Christmas day two years ago. Well, even they work probably on more solid findings.

Fellow developers, be more alert than me on that day.

When being asked to do a test like that, go somewhere else. Recruitment is known for being broken, but there are surely places where it is broken less.