You didn’t forget, did you? Forget that today is Employee Appreciation Day? Or forget what your high school SAT scores were?
First things first, which, for our more-or-less weekly roundup columns means that we begin with the weird, the odd, and the stuff you just gotta shake your head at. In this case, that’s the SATs.
Now, just as the company behind the Scholastic Aptitude Tests is overhauling the test, and saying it’s barely relevant, employers are starting to ask candidates for their SAT scores. It would be one thing — an odd thing, considering the test is taken in high school — if the candidates were upcoming or recent college grads. But The Wall Street Journal says mid-career people are being asked for their scores.
The Journal cited Cvent, an event management software company, as one firm that asks everyone for their SATs, plus other standardized test scores and college transcripts. Scores count most heavily for candidates in their first years out of college, though the company has received scores from applicants well into middle age, the Journal reported Eric Eden, Cvent’s vice president of marketing as saying.
Meanwhile The New York Times says the College Board is undertaking “a fundamental rethinking of the SAT.” The paper quotes College Board President David Coleman decrying his own test and its rival ACT as “disconnected from the work of our high schools.”
Must resist the comparison to the bizarre, curveball questions that are still the hallmark of so many interview processes, and which, Google, once a leader in their use, has since discarded.
Want to mess with your employees today, ask them all to produce their SAT scores. Then later, throw a pizza party and tell them you appreciate them so much they can forget that SAT score thing. Instead, administer the ACT onsite.
Or, here’s another idea for Employee Appreciation Day (that’s today, remember?). Get the CEO to record a video just like this one from the chief administrator of Prince George County. Or take everyone ziplining liek this Las Vegas mannequin shop did. Or throw a ‘flash mob’ party like this one at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital’s party.