SF VC firm required job applicants to take online IQ test
The owner of a San Francisco-based venture capital firm apologized after his company faced a social media backlash for requiring job applicants to take an online IQ test.
Aneel Ranadive, the founder of Soma Capital and the son of Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive, posted the mea culpa on Twitter after screenshots of a Soma job application with the IQ test requirement circulated online.
“Someone on the team recently posted a job posting w/ numerical tests that was horrifying for me to see and counter to the mission and not indicative of how I want to build Soma,” Ranadive said in a tweet Tuesday morning. “I found out yesterday and we removed immediately & will work 10x harder to be clear on culture.”
Vice reported that a New York investor posted a screenshot of the online application, which required prospective candidates to have taken an online IQ test on IQTest.com and a Myers-Briggs personality quiz on the site 16 Personalities, on Twitter on Monday.
The former is illegal under a 1971 Supreme Court ruling that decreed IQ tests and other tests unrelated to the job to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their effectiveness at measuring intellect equitably has also been put into question.
Myers-Briggs tests, on the other hand, have been repeatedly found to be “meaningless” and arbitrary — with classifications that fail to capture the complexity of human personalities.
In an interview with Vice, Ramadive attributed the test to “growing pains” and “immediately” scrubbed the question from applications. (Job postings on the Soma Capital website no longer show the IQ test requirement.)
“This is literally horrific to me and the frickin’ complete opposite of everything that I stand for and how I want to build [the] team and how I know how I frickin’ invest in founders as well,” he told Vice in an interview.
The company has touted its investments in self-driving car service Cruise and grocery delivery service Misfits Market, among other so-called “unicorns.”
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