Mastering Inductive Reasoning Tests: For Corporate Recruitment, Purposes simplifies the challenging task of structuring recruitment assessments, particularly inductive reasoning tests, and demystifies this often complex process. What inspired you to write a book on this topic?

It is almost Christmas, Early November, and I just received my MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering from my faculty. Such a thrill and excitement! “Now, I am ready for my next step in life,” I said, “a great career in my feld.” I felt more than ready. I looked at my credentials and saw that I had everything: a prestigious degree, academic awards, excellent recommendations, good experience, and fancy projects to show. All that was left was a great employer with whom to cooperate. “A famous multinational company will do,” I said to myself. Since I was based in Scandinavia at the time, I immediately picked the cream of the cream in terms of employers with exciting roles to offer; Volvo Cars, Scania, Uddeholm, Sandvik, and SEB were just a few of my top choices. And indeed, my credentials were noticed. I started receiving the first invitations from the employers until I realized they were invitations to some online evaluations, Psychometric, they called it. This was the first time in my life I heard the term, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I quickly rushed in, opened the invitation, entered the app, and began processing the tests. Inductive reasoning evaluations were coupled with a personality profile assessment in all of the cases. Twenty minutes have passed into the app, and I went from heaven to hell quite abruptly. Score results were somewhat poor – far from ideal- and rejection letters started coming one by one; it was stated that I was not the appropriate fit for their roles. I felt devastated and demoralized. To make things worse, my family insisted that it was impossible to overcome these tests; they told me it was impossible to get the roles I wanted and that I needed to compromise. I decided not to follow their “advice” and dedicated myself for the next months to improve my skills in inductive reasoning tests. I downloaded books, started reading relevant material, and made paid subscriptions to paid simulation services to improve myself. In the meantime, I applied to many more companies worldwide and received more invitations to evaluations. Gradually, I saw myself improving my results, and in a short period, I began excelling in them. Then, after rejecting several job offers I received and seeing they were not the perfect fit for me, I re-applied to many of my top industry employer choices, and I was lucky to receive the invitations again. But I was ready this time, and at last, it happened… I succeeded—I was the top performer in the selection candidate pool that took the test. In the following years, I kept improving professionally and applied to many more prestigious roles offered by top-notch employers for even more exciting ones. And I succeeded in every evaluation I participated in. Eventually, I created my own standardized procedure for preparing for these corporate challenges and created my own database, which I referred to. After a decade of battling with the corporate world for roles I wanted to challenge myself, I mastered the “art” of excelling in psychometric evaluations with innovative tools I created myself. Then, I started thinking back to the time when I was just a foolish graduate with big dreams and ambitions, with my only weapon to defend against these monstrous challenges was my energy and desire to succeed. I was tortured multiple times by failures, rejections and endless hours of practice, trying to build my foundation and move my capacity to perform even further beyond. It was so painful just revisiting these memories. I thought about all the candidates they must be experiencing now, all these torturous experiences I lived in the previous years. Fast forward some years, and I became an accomplished professional. Finally, I decided to create a tool that would help ambitious, primarily young professionals, to succeed in their dreams and efforts with less pain, mental struggle, agony and psychological pain caused by the rejections that inevitably inflict on them by minimizing it. When I was creating this book, I wanted to provide the necessary “weapons” to the candidate to fight the hard battle it was about to be given and protect them from unnecessary losses – time, energy and vitality- for adding more quality to their life, and shield them from being crushed by the brutal reality of the competitive corporate job market. I tried to create the “magical” tool I wish I had when I was in their shoes some years ago, and I desperately needed. And, at the end of the day, I feel that, to some degree, I made it!

How much research did you undertake for this book and how much time did it take to put it all together?

I started spending time practising, researching, and honing my inductive reasoning skills from the time I received my first invitations for online evaluations. The invitations began coming to my inbox after I applied for multiple corporate roles in the fall of 2017. I used numerous subscription services that offered simulation tests and educational material for the inductive reasoning tests and the recruitment process in general. When I was exposed to this material for the first time, and this happened after I experienced several spectacular failures, I became obsessed with finding everything about corporate recruitment, the inductive reasoning tests, and the other psychometric evaluation modules – numerical reasoning tests, personality profile assessment, test centre evaluations- and understand in a deep level the assessments’ role in the grand scheme of the corporate recruitment. I was fascinated – and at the same time relieved- to learn that these tests are designed to push you to your limits, and it was natural to fail without adequate preparation. Even more so, learning that the challenge can be overcome with methodical and dedicated practice.

At the same time, I began receiving more invitations for corporate roles I was highly interested in pursuing, and I wasted no time. I started with laser-focused research on every detail of the invitation—which recruitment agency sent me the test, what type of test I was invited to complete, the format of the upcoming test, and the completion rules.

Once I had gathered this information, I began immediately digging into the simulation tests I had available in my subscription. I gave my 100% in the completion of each simulation, and after I finished the module, I meticulously studied and reflected – based on the results given by the simulation service- on every single answer and mistake I made. During the Sundays of my preparation period for each test – approximately 2 to 3 weeks before each evaluation- I researched academic databases and papers on brain studies and strategies for maximizing my learning performance and levelling my skills. Based on my research, I found some beneficial and practical facts about our brain, how it works, how the learning process takes place and what actions and methods maximize the learning outcome for getting out more from the hours of preparation I invested. Based on these facts, I designed a learning system to efficiently and effectively prepare for the tests in the limited amount of time I had. This is the system I share in my book, in the first chapters, and this is precisely the same one I used and extensively applied in preparation for each evaluation.

Coming back to my preparation before a critical evaluation, I documented in an illustrative form every new pattern I encountered in my preparation. I ruthlessly reflected on and documented every error I made, why I made it, and how I could immediately improve it in my following simulation. Long story short, the time came for the first very critical psychometric evaluation – which was for the engineering graduate programme from Volvo Cars- and it was the first major success I had after 7 previously failed attempts. Though in the end, I messed up in the interview process, and I did not take the coveted and lucrative contract, I saw with my eyes that what I learned in my preparation and research was true, and my methods worked. It is important to mention that in every online evaluation I completed, I used a screen recorder app to record every test I gave. This provided me with a huge amount of valuable data to process, evaluate, reflect on, and enrich my patterns’ record database.

In the years to come, after the spring of 2017, I faced many drawbacks and failures in the corporate recruitment process, and I was forced to take on numerous low-paid jobs to pay the bills. However, I always continued applying and was constantly evaluated in the tests. After each evaluation, I saw my scores being perfected, receiving very positive feedback from the corporations I applied to, and, of course, being more enriched in experience with new and “fresh” recorded data from my online evaluations, which I analyzed thoroughly every time. Over the years, I also started digging into the commercial bibliography regarding the psychometrics test preparation and educational material circulating on the web, and I found them quite shallow. They provided very trivial advice for the preparation, which is very inadequate, and the sample preparation questions are equally shallow and trivial in that it does not reflect the real difficulty level one will encounter on their actual evaluation based on the adaptive nature of the test’s algorithm.

My experience with the simulation test services was not ideal either. Many of these services focus primarily on the design of the user’s interface and the offer of some performance metrics, which, based on my experience from the actual evaluations, I also found quite inaccurate – failed to incorporate many criteria that the actual application takes into account to produce your score result (such as the behaviour of the user inside the app, the response rate, and the time of completion of each task). However, the major challenge was the very low quality of explaining the “inner mechanisms” of each pattern presented in the simulation test tasks. This left the user alone to “figure it out” and made the preparation process quite challenging.

After almost 8 years of research and first–hand experience with psychometric evaluations, I tried to address and resolve these challenges for new and fresh candidates by delivering high-quality educational material that made the preparation for the challenge even smoother and considerably less stressful than the one I experienced at my time.

Gathering the material and building the knowledge for creating the book took me approximately seven years, and finalizing the writing of my book took me an additional two years, considering it was a side project that I managed in parallel with my corporate duties.

What is a common misconception people have about psychometric tests and how they are used and evaluated?

There is a misconception about what psychometric tests measure and their true purpose and role in the recruitment process inside a multinational corporation. The public perceives psychometric tests as “IQ” tests, and there is some truth to this opinion, but it is not the whole picture. Psychometric tests are designed to measure your tolerance to stress and mental fatigue. This is the primary objective, and that is the reason why the time limit exists in these tests.

The IQ tests measure an individual’s ability to analyze and solve rational problems, which is, of course, a prerequisite for succeeding in the evaluation. However, these tests go one step beyond; they gradually increase the mental load and pressure to evaluate how composed and capable an individual is in applying problem-solving skills in any situation.

An IQ test is like a 200-meter sprint race, in which you must run a couple of times to see how fast you can cover the distance.

However, the psychometric tests can be perceived as running a 200-meter sprint 20 times in a row, but each time, an additional 2 kg weight is added to test whether you can perform well enough for all 20 repetitions of the task.

What is the next book that you are working on?

I plan to stay in the same corporate recruiting and psychometric tests field and deliver a similar educational preparation guide, but this time, I am focusing on numerical evaluations. These evaluations are very famous and frequently encountered in engineering and financial roles. Though the fundamental knowledge required to perform is different for engineering and finance roles, it would be highly beneficial for a professional—especially an engineer—to have mastery of both.

It is an equally challenging project, which has been approached and delivered much better by the existing literature in commerce, but I have some innovative ideas and material on how to deliver more value a bit more innovatively.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see what the public says after the project is finished and released!

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