20 Jun, 2026

Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote job, I'm looking for hybrid). I found one that advertised an opening they called "GTM". I thought that was cool re: no specific scope, just someone who could make their product attractive to buyers however they can.

Product seemed good (ETL type of tool). Everything was about what I expected, until this blurb at the end:

If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out to our anonymized careers inbox with your resume. Please include your undergrad GPA and your SAT scores (other standardized tests such as GRE, GMAT, etc. are acceptable in lieu of SAT scores) even if you are several years or even decades removed from undergrad. We do not have any cut-offs for either metric, but note that failure to provide these will disqualify your application from further consideration.

I found this interesting for two reasons:

• Since 2023 or so, I've noticed more and more tech companies and hyper-growth startups dropping bachelor's degree requirements. Instead, many ask about side projects/links to personal websites/blurbs about what you're most proud of. Basically, indicators that someone is passionate and a 'self-starter.'
• Why would you ask for a self-reported, unverifiable test score that could be decades old at this point? There must be a better predictor for current cognitive ability than that, if that's what you're testing for. If not, this seems like a trick question to test compliance with pointless directives.

Under ideal conditions, SAT scores are probably a decent proxy for predicting whether a new hire will contribute to the success of your business. Cognitive ability is, unsurprisingly, positively correlated with professional success.

That said, there are clear problems with using an old SAT score as a decades-old litmus test for intelligence:

• You're partly making your decision based on who someone was as a 17 year old.
• Each applicant took the test under unknown conditions. You don't know if this was their first attempt or their fifth, whether they walked in cold or worked with a tutor for months, or whether they came from a perfectly stable home life or found out the night before that their dog died/parents are getting divorced/worked the night shift at a grocery store to help pay rent. Maybe they struggled with addiction and rebellion in their youth. There are probably many reasons why two candidates, equally cognitively capable, got different scores, or that a test taken a decade ago wouldn't reflect a candidate's current ability.

Regardless of whether they were testing compliance or cognitive ability, this unusual request led me down a rabbit hole of hiring practices. Both the gold-standard, time-tested methods and the bizarre, almost mystical attempts to see the future or know someone else's soul.

A very very brief history of hiring assessments

Historians credit the military with establishing the 'science' of the modern hiring assessment.

In 1917, staring down the fraught pitch of WWI, the army had to sort 1.5 million recruits quickly into the units for which they were best suited. Due to the time crunch, traditional interviews weren't gonna cut it.

Robert Yerkes and his committee developed the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests as a solve, the former for literate recruits and the latter for illiterate recruits or those who didn't speak English. They were basically the same, just Army Beta was nonverbal to circumvent communication barriers. These formed the basis of group-administered cognitive tests.

The other founding lineage is the assessment center, originally used for spy selection. Personality theorist Henry Murray ran a three day program at a bucolic estate tucked away in the country with simulations and multiple assessors. In the mid 1950s, AT&T launched a longitudinal study to see whether these assessment center ratings held water and found they worked decently well as a predictor for success.

The methods that appear to work best most often

No hiring method is perfect, of course, but we do have evidence that a mixture of a couple methods work best in predicting future professional success.

As of 1998, the cognitive test (of which SAT is one) was considered the best predictor. Then, in 2022, Sackett et al. argued convincingly that structured interviews, not cognitive assessments, were the strongest predictor of job performance.

As of the writing of this blog, these are the methods with the best evidence for predicting success on the job in knowledge work:

• Structured interviews: These interviews must have consistent questions, a scoring rubric, and trained interviewers to work. They topped Sackett's list of 'best hiring assessments', but even they weren't super consistent (results had an 80% credibility interval). The TL;DR was that, naturally, the effectiveness of this method varies a lot based on how well-trained the interviewer is and how sound and consistent the rubric is.
• Work sample tests and job knowledge tests: Take-home projects or a trial period of some kind. This makes the most intuitive sense by far: having candidates do a representative slice of the job gives you a solid idea of whether they'd be any good at it. Combining this with structured interviews was (before AI) considered a gold standard; you'd get a sense of who they are and how they work by talking, have a way to compare them pretty objectively to other candidates because of the structured and consistent nature of the interview process, and then you'd get a sense of how they apply their attributes practically to the job via the work exercise.
• Cognitive ability tests: Still strong predictors, just not the strongest. Most useful for jobs with heavy training or learning demands, less useful for jobs where the demands closely match a candidate's prior experience.
• Assessment centers (spy shit): Great for predicting managerial aptitude but extremely expensive and time consuming, obviously.

Methods that do not work

I ran into a couple that you could've guessed from a mile away wouldn't work (ex: Myers Briggs and handwriting analysis). One of the least effective predictors was unstructured interviews or 'chats', which was interesting, because this is the assessment I encounter most often.

I'm guilty of doing these myself. These are common because they're easy, obviously, but they're vulnerable to a slew of fallacies: impression management, inconsistent questioning, halo effects, and similar-to-me bias (I like you because you're me!).

An internal Google study of tens of thousands of interviews reportedly found little to no correlation between interviewer scores and eventual job performance.

I also stumbled upon a bunch of instances of bright, adventurous thinkers trying to brute force all the barriers to getting to know someone and their abilities by trying extreme outsider assessments.

One I thought was fun because people are crazy and I think that's great: in 1921, disappointed by a perceived lack of rigor among the latest crop of college graduates, Edison devised a 163 question trivia exam. Included a bunch of random questions he knew the answer to (one was 'what kind of wood are kerosene barrels made from', and the answer was not 'who cares?').

Edison also subjected candidates to the 'salt test'. He'd serve candidates soup, and if they salted it before tasting it, he'd allegedly disqualify them. His theory here was that this proved they operated on assumptions.

Unorthodox hiring assessments aren't solely confined to distant history. A bunch of tech companies have used them, too. Ex: I'm sure you've heard of the stupid brain teasers popularized by Microsoft and Google. They'd ask candidates questions like "why are manhole covers round?" Google's Head of HR, Laszlo Bock, called these brainteasers "a complete waste of time" that "don't predict anything" and serve only to "make the interviewer feel smart" in his book.

Then there was Zappos founder Tony Hsieh (smart, cool-seeming dude, tragic story). He had the airport screen and 'the offer'. The airport screen entailed Zappos flying a potential hire out. Upon arrival, they'd be picked up in a company shuttle. At the end of the day, the recruiter would ask the driver how they were treated. If they were treated badly, the candidate was not hired.

With 'the offer', after a 4 week time investment of training, each new hire would be offered $100 (and later up to $3,000) to quit on the spot. The goal was to see if they were really in it to win it or if they'd leave for easy money.

How to hire in the age of AI

Returning to why I'm writing this in the first place: I have no idea why this ETL startup asked for my SAT scores (have truly never seen that before in my adult life), but it is possible they're trying to get a read on raw, non AI-assisted intelligence.

It's definitely getting increasingly difficult to evaluate raw intelligence using the current gold standard methods post-AI. All resumes read the same and include every single keyword in the job description, and the cover letters all have the same 'hard-hitting, journalistic style'. It makes everyone seem like a perfect, phony all star. I can see why you'd default to a standardized test taken long before generative AI rose from the sand and slouched toward Silicon Valley to be born.

You could make the argument it doesn't matter, since the applicant can use AI at work, so whatever they send is still a fair representation of the quality of work they'd do on the job. But I get why you'd want to assess the raw horsepower of the pilot you'll have at the helm of even our most intelligent and autonomous tools.

I hope this one application isn't indicative of a larger trend that's coming our way. In case it is, here are a few alternatives I think would make more sense and that, as an applicant, I'd be totally willing to do:

• Timed/live exercise (preferably in person if the role is in-office or hybrid. Otherwise, you could hire someone remotely or send a nearby employee to proctor the assessment).
• You could still do a take home exercise, but then have the live meeting just be an interrogation about their work. If they're made to defend it or explain it, you'll probably have a better idea of whether the idea 'came from them', or if they at least understand what the AI generated enough to talk fluidly about it.
• Bring back the in-person white boarding exercise.
• For sales, live roleplay.

All of these exercises would have portions that need to be done face-to-face, either with a proctor or someone part of the hiring process. It's just too easy to use AI to take shortcuts if you're interfacing through a computer screen.

Even trying to hire people for my team in the last year, I've noticed many candidates' gaze darting to the side and staying there after a particularly meaty question. It looks a hell of a lot like they're reading and reciting a response from Claude, but, of course, I can't prove they're doing this over looking at their own notes or just getting a quick refresher on the job description. For those reasons, while it's certainly suspicious, I don't feel right taking points off for it.

I haven't kept up with the post-AI hiring discourse in tech so maybe these hiring practices are already in use. But it's clear the best predictors of future success tend to be assessments that are verifiable, current, and reasonably controlled. So we might have to return to the in-person proctored test with paper and pencil.