Silicon Valley companies are known for being a bit outlandish – from extravagant benefits to unusual management practices – but a venture capital firm in San Francisco may have taken things just a bit too far.
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Soma Capital is being called out for making people applying for jobs at the company take an IQ test online as part of their application, according to reporting by Vice.
Asking for this kind of intelligence measure isn't just controversial, it's illegal. A 1971 Supreme Court ruling found that these types of practices are discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The company's founder, Aneel Ranadive, claimed to have found out about that element of the application recently, according to a Twitter post he wrote on Tuesday.
"Someone on the team recently posted a job posting w/ numerical tests that was horrifying for me to see and counter to the mission and not indicative of how I want to build Soma," said Ranadive. "I found out yesterday and we removed immediately & will work 10x harder to be clear on culture."
Screenshots of the application, which included the request for an IQ test score as well as a Myers-Briggs personality test as first reported by the outlet on Tuesday.
The outlet found the screenshots after they were tweeted by an "angel investor" in New York who'd applied for the post.
The investor tweeted that he's "not going to doxx them…" but guessed that perhaps it was a trick question, and submitted a link to the 1971 Supreme Court case instead.
"This was absolutely a new initiative," Ranadive told Vice in an interview, and the experience taught him that he needs "clearly have oversight continually on every detail," and he has since removed the question from the application.
Soma Capital Partners did not respond to KCBS Radio's request for comment at the time of publication.
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