![]() ![]() V ista treats its test as proprietary, and declined to discuss it with me or let me take it. Your spot on the lifeboat could be at stake. ![]() If the Vista approach continues to gain favor-and when someone makes as much money as Smith is making, the competition tends to notice-you may soon be asked to take a timed standardized test, whether you’re fresh out of school or an executive trying to make a mid-career move. “Who’s the first one you throw overboard? Who’s the second? Who’s the third?” We’re all in a lifeboat, and we’ve got 11 people on it.” He then pauses dramatically. “Here’s how this works: Our ship goes down. Smith advises Vista managers to be constantly on the lookout for their worst performers. Indeed, when Robert Smith describes his management philosophy, it sounds less like the foosball-and-free-snacks stereotype of software start-ups than something out of the dog-eat-dog corporate culture of old. corporations were using tests to evaluate managers and junior executives. In 1956, the business journalist William Whyte reported in his classic study The Organization Man that about a quarter of U.S. Cognitive testing of executives may be at the bleeding edge of this focus on analytics, but it also harks back to the middle of the last century, when employees up and down corporate organizational charts were routinely given IQ tests. Research from the “people analytics” movement holds that firms can use objective assessment tools-not just old-fashioned intuition-to hire and develop employees. “For my last three permanent employers,” he replied. I recently texted a friend from college, a 50-year-old former chief marketing officer who had switched jobs recently, to ask whether he had taken this kind of test. It boasts that it can help identify “top talent” through a battery of exams, such as the Mettl Cognitive Abilities Assessment. The company describes its tests as “especially useful for mid- and higher-level jobs.” Mettl, another testing firm, has more than 1,500 corporate clients globally, including giants such as Accenture and Microsoft. ![]() Criteria Corp., an employment-testing company, says its Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test has been administered to more than 2 million people, many of them current and prospective managers. Like Vista, many companies now subject not only entry-level applicants but also managers to testing. Testing is sufficiently widespread today that a cottage industry has developed to help people prepare perusing the site of one such firm, JobTestPrep, I saw sample exams for jobs at Amazon, Ford, UPS, and others. Vista is an especially enthusiastic proponent of testing in the workplace, but it is not alone. He likes to tell rags-to-riches stories: senior employees who began as a mail-room worker, a roofer, a shelf stocker. Smith describes Vista as a pure meritocracy, where high performers succeed regardless of their background, race, or gender. Testing, Smith says, helps his companies find talented people-people the competition has overlooked because their résumé lacked certain credentials or because of the inherent biases of managers. Applicants to Vista companies, from the entry to the senior-executive levels, are subjected to a timed standardized test. Vista’s marketing materials tout its “talent and performance management,” a key element of which is a kind of assessment many people find harrowing. On one subject, however, Smith has been relatively open, even chatty: the firm’s knack for hiring and promoting the right people. He rarely gives interviews-the recent cover story of Forbes’s “World’s Richest People” issue was an exception-and he guards Vista’s secrets closely. Smith is not the household name that Oprah is, and he seems to prefer it that way. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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