I think the only complaint I've had with tests like these is that feel like they happen in the wrong place in the process. Whenever I've applied for a job that involved testing like this they happened after you've spent potentially multiple hours filling in the application form and completing a personal statement (i.e. the bit where you relate skills/experience to the person specification). It's therefore a bit galling to have wasted hours on an application and then get rejected automatically. It would be far more preferable if organisations using such methods to sift took your personal details at stage one, did the assessments as stage two and then as stage three invited only those who had passed the assessments to spend hours on their personal statements. I can't particularly think of any downsides for the recruiting organisation apart from it might take a bit longer as you'd need to allow a little bit of time for those that passed to complete their statements but it's not as if, on the railway anyway, that recruitment is a quick process!
I guess the issue with that is that rather then having recruitment take longer (and as you rightly pointed out, it already often takes a long time!) it's more likely it would just result in a much lower cut off point in terms of the maximum number of applications received before the job is pulled from the website. There is only a finite number of recruitment staff with a finite amount of time to sort through applications. Unless you increased these as well (which of course would cost money) you'd still end up with only a small amount of people getting through, but now you'd be sifting through a much smaller group, so potentially you'd have fewer decent applicants. I do understand your frustration, but I suspect if the sift was done manually the result would be a lot of frustrated people who didn't submit their application on time. These jobs often close after 2 or 3 days even now - with a manual sift that time might be measured in hours!
You also need to ask the question of the TOCs - is the current system working? From what I've seen (and I'm speaking as a former conductor and also a minder for trainee conductors), most of the new conductors that are coming through, both at my own TOC and at others are of a very high standard indeed.
I'm not here to disrespect but its stupidly hard and has nothing to do with how good of a conductor you'll make I even showed the pharmacist I work with and she has no idea with those sorts of questions and shes stupidly smart. And with some of the conductors iv experienced alot I dont see how they did maybe help from some one else as they will never find out??
I've no doubt your pharmacist friend is very intelligent but I would question what they know about the guards role? These tests aren't just designed to measure intelligence (and I certainly wouldn't consider myself more intelligent then the average pharmacist!) but all kinds of suitabilities towards the role. In terms of maths, at Northern for example you're selling a lot of small value tickets, which means doing a lot of mental arithmetic in a short amount of time whilst also dealing with all the other physical and mental demands of the job.
And yes, I'm sure that a lot of the old hands around now would never be able to get through the recruitment process today, that's true. But if you look at the standard of many of the old hands, versus the standards of many of the new ones, I know which recruitment system I think is more successful on average.....
