A large new study (nearly 58,000 people) offers a usual data point for anyone thinking about how IQ tests get used in hiring and promotion. Researchers compared scores across job functions (Finance, Engineering, Customer Service, Sales) and industries (Business/Finance, Manufacturing, Retail), controlling for age, education, gender, and management level. The takeaway: most cognitive differences between these groups were small, and general reasoning and vocabulary scores barely differed at all. The real differences showed up in specific skills. Finance professionals were faster and more accurate with numbers while Engineering and Manufacturing workers scored higher on spatial visualization.
That has a practical implication for testing and selection. A single overall IQ composite may not tell you much about who’s likely to succeed in a given role, since the groups looked pretty similar on broad measures. What mattered was the specific facet. Numeracy for finance roles, spatial reasoning for technical/manufacturing roles. This lines up with a broader debate in the field about whether organizations should lean on general cognitive ability tests at all, versus more targeted tools (situational judgment tests, skills-specific assessments, even proofreading tasks) that map more directly onto job demands. The findings suggest that if testing is used, matching the type of cognitive measure to the specific demands of the role may be more informative than a single global score.
But it is worth flagging that this is exploratory research on broad occupational categories that surely contain a lot of internal variation, the sample was mostly white and English-speaking, and there’s no data on whether people who scored higher were actually more successful or satisfied in their jobs. So it’s a reasonable nudge toward “test for relevant skills, not just general ability,” not a definitive blueprint for redesigning hiring processes.
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.114012