Working in selection, I can say it’s more nuanced than that. Any measurement can be used as long as it is relevant to the business and related to performance. For example, you’re fine to reject people based on height if you’re hiring basketball players and being higher predicts scoring more points. Or even reject people based on gender (or other protected classes) if you can demonstrate that that specific group is absolutely necessary for you e.g. you want a counselor working with sexual trauma survivors and have evidence that matching patients to counselor on gender gives meaningfully better results for said patients.
The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.
Yeah if you're willing to go into a decade-long court fight then maybe they'll allow you to use a test (where the burden of proof is on the employer to show the test is necessary, i.e. guilty until proven innocent). Or maybe you'll be liable for millions of dollars in compensation. And even something as seemingly reasonable as an IQ test for a knowledge work position is illegal.
No it isn't. This Griggs v Duke Power meme is an internet myth. Practically every white collar job can use IQ tests to qualify applicants, and a few very large companies do exactly this.
You call it a myth yet it was a real case, with that real conclusion, and the subsequent case of New York having to pay for daring to require a teacher licensing test was also real. You can't just dismiss real examples by calling it a "myth". You also omit that "very large companies" almost universally have DEI departments and affirmative action policies to shield themselves [1]. And it is still the opinion of law professors that such tests are legally risky [2]:
Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, using IQ tests could violate the law if the tests are shown to have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities or women, and are not job-related, New York University School of Law Professor Samuel Estreicher told The Post.
Estreicher added that the use of IQ and Myers-Briggs tests also risks violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars companies from requiring applicants to take mental or physical examinations prior to offering them jobs.
“To avoid legal risk, companies shouldn’t rely on these tests,” Estreicher said. “They should just be talking to job applicants.”
Lydia Brown, a policy counsel at advocacy group the Center for Democracy and Technology, said trying to quanitfy an applicant’s intelligence is a ” rather slippery concept.”
“Employers need to really carefully consider whether their test is actually measuring a quality or trait that is necessary to perform the job — and that’s a legal standard,” Brown told The Post.
Key element of your quote: “if the tests [...] are not job-related”
There’s nothing magic about IQ tests. Any hiring criteria that isn’t sufficiently linked (the threshold here has always been low, and the trend has been to lower it further) and is also shown to have an uneven impact by protected class is a problem.
And now we're pretending to not understand chilling effects. And again ignoring how New York had to pay for asking teaching-related questions to prospective teachers.
The (well-known) companies that sell general cognitive testing services for employment applications have logo crawls that include household names with deep pockets. It's an internet myth.
The reason general cognitive IQ testing isn't more commonly used in employment settings is that it doesn't work very well.
IQ testing in white collar US employment is not unlawful and several household name companies openly perform general cognitive assessments; the companies that provide those tests have logo crawls just like every other product company. Griggs doesn't say what you think it says.
IQ testing is uncommon in US employment because it doesn't do a good job of selecting candidates, not because it's unlawful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
[2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-...
[3] https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-a...