Boy, do I hate companies that administer "tests" that have absolutely nothing to do with the job you're applying for. Particularly when they waste huge amounts of your productive time in doing so.
Today's warning is about Konsus, a company you might see tooting around about how they are a San Francisco startup with tons of tech money behind them and looking for the best possible candidates for their open positions, including content writer/researcher, software developer and graphic design positions.
Unfortunately, whoever designed their hiring system is off in la-la land somewhere (and I don't mean LA). They claim to only accept "the top 1% of all candidates" ... but there's an instant red flag when they ask you to agree up front that a starting salary of $12 an hour is OK with you. Bruh. Mid-level generalist content writers make at least twice that much, let alone software developers in the Bay Area! The "top 1%" of content writers already make that by typing out less than a paragraph. Methinks your eyes are a little bigger than your stomach, Konsus ... but let's continue.
Strike one is the salary way out of line with expectations. Strike two, three, four and five is their ridiculous employment test. It starts out fairly standard - link to a portfolio / published work, answer some not-so-hard grammar and reading comprehension questions.
The bullshit part comes at the tail end of all this. They hit you up with 30 minutes of SAT-like pattern recognition questions, the last couple of sections of which are extremely abstract and difficult. Miss a question or two in any one section and you've FAILED, you get NOTHING! GOOD DAY SIR!
See, this is what happens when you let tech whiz kids who don't understand basic human interaction and don't have enough general common sense run shit. I'm sure whoever implemented this system was aping Google's practice of testing developers with abstract logic puzzles, thinking "Well if Google gets the best and brightest this way, then so can we!"
Nobody stopped to think that these tests are usually just given to the creme de la creme of software developers, and are maaaaybe overkill for people who do Powerpoints and write articles that drive search traffic ... oh, and also for a job that starts at 12 lousy dollars per hour. Did it occur to any of you SiliconBro geniuses to do, like, basic market and salary research before developing this scheme?
Well anyway, thanks for wasting my time, jerks. I'll just go back to making more than twice as much money pitching clients at the job you just decreed I wasn't capable of. Good luck fielding a viable workforce with this plan.
It's not a "scam" in the sense that they're financially defrauding anybody (that I know of) ... they're just wasting people's time for a job that seems mediocre to begin with. I suggest you don't waste your time (unless you really love pattern recognition puzzles and don't have anything else going on).
Umm, no. They are a scammer. Just tried to hit my account with .01 to see if charge would go through with declined event. Don't know anything about them.
ReplyDeleteMethinks they're scammers too, also receiving a "test" debit charge of $0.00 to ascertain if my account was active.
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