Adult People Are Asking Other Adult People Their SAT Score in Job Interviews

According to the Wall Street Journal(…), getting asked your often decades-old SAT score in a job interview is now a thing we should worry about (WHAT):

Stephen Robert Morse was a candidate for a communications job when the recruiter told him to be ready to discuss his SAT score in a coming interview.

Mr. Morse, 28 years old, said he was “shocked” that a potential boss would be interested in the results of a test he took more than a decade earlier. He passed on the opportunity.

Proving the adage that all of life is like high school, plenty of employers still care about a job candidate’s SAT score. Consulting firms such as Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co. and banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ask new college recruits for their scores, while other companies request them even for senior sales and management hires, eliciting scores from job candidates in their 40s and 50s.

Firstly, I refuse to believe this isn’t a very isolated trend, or one specific to recent college grads getting hired by banks. But has anyone actually had this happen to them? Sometimes when I think about all the time I spent studying for and taking and obsessed over the SATs without realizing how little they matter, well, it makes me wonder what I am stressing about right now that is similarly meaningless.

But then again I spent the morning reading this piece by Elizabeth Kolbert about taking the SAT as an adult, and my main complaint with it was that she never told us her SAT score! Which almost makes me wish I was interviewing Elizabeth Kolbert at Bain & Co. so that she would have to tell me.

Apparently, per the article, even Google used to consider things like GPA, alma mater, and test scores in their hiring process, which seems pretty outmoded for a company like Google:

but the company changed tactics about two years ago, when data showed that traditionally pedigreed candidates didn’t always make better hires.

Internal studies found “very little correlation between SAT scores and job performance,” said Kyle Ewing, head of global staffing programs at Google. The company now relies on interview questions that probe how a potential hire has solved complex problems in the past.

Oh man I hate that interview question.

Sooo, what did all of you get on the SATs? And describe for me, if you will, a time when you were faced with great adversity at work and what you did to overcome it.

Photo: Yes Otter Photography

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