HH asking me to take a psychometric exam

I’m Analyst 1 at a top BB and have been in early contact with a couple of headhunters. One of them has sent me a link to do one of those psychometric exams where you have to answer a bunch of logical and math questions in a short amount of time.

Is this normal part of the process? I’ve never heard of anyone else doing these as part of on or off cycle. I’d really rather not do it since I find those tests annoyingly difficult and don’t want to take time to practice for them when I could be prepping technicals.

I’m still getting other inbounds from HHs even at the same group, so possibly just part of one interview process?

10 Comments
 

Anonymous Monkey:

Better than the prostate exam they had me do


Have to make sure you’re fit enough to be thoroughly reamed by your principals

 

Update in case anyone finds this while googling, but I just didn’t do the test and they’re still sending me emails with opportunities. Lol.

 

Doesn't really matter much outside of certain firms that do first cut based off these tests. A lot of tech funds do some version of this like Vista and AKKR. It's just a way for firms to lower the number of people in the funnel. 

 

I got cut by Nordic Capital because of thus BS. I scored 99%-tile in the verbal test (watson glaser) and 75%-centile in the ravens matrix test. The normal distribution is against „business executives“. 

They said minimum requirement is 80% in each test - fucking lol.

 

Every fund with a psychometric exam seems to have a never-ending off-cycle process that takes few or zero people on-cycle, probably not a coincidence. At some point it's less about finding the best candidates and more about justifying an overly engineered process.

Most egregious: heard of a 3-month process where candidates spoke to 10+ people, flew out for a full-day in-person, and zero offers came out. That fund is always in market.  Almost like the process is the problem for some of these funds. IMO, some of these funds are just abusing their brand to run candidates through the wringer knowing people will still go through it all to get a job at their fund. 

 

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