The pre-hiring assessment is like something concocted by Jigsaw himself. Absolutely sadistic model designed to drive the applicant insane and/or to give up after already having invested 5-10 hours of preparation for an impossible-to-pass test.
Here's how applying to a freelance Transcription and Content QA Editor role goes:
1. Submit application
2. Be scheduled for and attend 2-hour orientation session walking you through the job requirements, style guide and pre-onboarding test that you will need to pass in order to be onboarded
3. Perform 3-4 more hours of practice tests in preparation for the REAL test (which you are told most people fail--more on this later)
4. Scratch your head repeatedly at the correct solutions to the practice questions, many of which are in direct contradiction with things you were told during the orientation session
5. Ask yourself how anyone could possibly define a single correct solution in the first place to test cases that are by their very nature subjective/up to some level of individual interpretation, i.e. is the speech cadence "staccato" or "choppy"? Does this comma adequately convey the pause in this dialogue or should a [pause] be added?
6. Give up eventually on trying to understand the why's (Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown) and proceed to the real test, come what may
7. Submit your answers only to have them be rejected by the system, presumably because YOUR interpretation of the response did not 100 percent match the system's, except this time you have no idea which part of your response the machine did not like, only that something in your response is not what it was looking for
8. Attempt to guess at the offending part(s) of your responses blindly anyway
9. Do this a few times because the system juuuuust still doesn't seem to agree with what you are inputting
10. Do this even more times because by this point you've already invested 8+ hours of your life on this application
11. Eventually give up because you can't achieve a perfect match no matter how many times you try, finally realizing how/why so many people "fail" this test
In short, Iâve never felt more disrespected by a prospective employer in my 17 years in the workforce. Iâm only putting them on blast to hopefully get them to realize this is not how you treat job seekers. At the very least, allow them to fail your Rumpelstiltskinesque test outright with a modicum of dignity.
