Probably pretty common. When I was in my early 20s I applied for a relatively high paying job delivering beer locally. They had us all take a test...I don't remember a ton about it but it seemed a combination of general knowledge and 'IQ' testish questions.
The guy told me nobody had ever got a perfect score before, but they wouldn't hire me. For the same reason listed in the article - I wouldn't stick around long before finding something better. The guy was nice about it, and said I could find something better than this position. At the time I felt a bit cheated, but thinking back I guess that's correct. I was off programming computers about 3 years later.
That said, this was beer delivery, not tax funded policing. I think we'd all be better served by having smarter police.
Long stretches of automaticity definitely give my brain a chance to simmer whatever ingredients are in it at the moment. One of the luckiest times in my first few years of work was being able to listen to audiobooks and podcasts for almost 40 hours a week, for several years. I think that gave me a little bit of a wide range of the world to begin building a complex systems model of it in my mind.
Managers appreciate skills, but want a warm body that won't bail in a couple of months, forcing the manager to cover the shifts themselves.
A good beer example of how to get past that filter was the father of a childhood friend. He worked for a beer distributor all through college (back when drinking age was 18), and was wildly popular among friends for always knowing where the biggest parties were going to be every weekend. They knew he was going to be around for 3-4 years at least, so they could plan ahead (and probably count on him recommending someone for the job when he graduated).
The guy told me nobody had ever got a perfect score before, but they wouldn't hire me. For the same reason listed in the article - I wouldn't stick around long before finding something better. The guy was nice about it, and said I could find something better than this position. At the time I felt a bit cheated, but thinking back I guess that's correct. I was off programming computers about 3 years later.
That said, this was beer delivery, not tax funded policing. I think we'd all be better served by having smarter police.