Inside the new job stress test

I will never play quarterback in the National Football League. I can't plant my feet in the pocket and throw into a tight window. I'm too short and flat-footed, and my asthmatic lungs give up after mere minutes of physical exertion. In high school, the only varsity letters I received were for marching band.

But when I recently took the NFL's preeminent player evaluation, it revealed that I have several skills that pro teams are looking for. In fact, I outperformed nearly all draft prospects in certain categories of this test, floundering on only one. The best part? I didn't even break a sweat.

I took the exam while sitting in an office chair within the suburban Tennessee corporate headquarters of a testing startup called S2 Cognition. Purporting to be the "only sports evaluation that scientifically measures an athlete's game-speed cognitive abilities down to a millisecond level," these tests — which feel like a cross between playing Pong and taking an eye exam — have fast become part and parcel of how many scouts find the next billion-dollar athlete. More than 52 colleges and universities and 16 of the NFL's 32 teams pay S2 to administer tests to prospective signees and to keep the results confidential.

Jack Marucci, the longtime athletic-training director at the SEC powerhouse Louisiana State University, told me the tests helped him identify his athletes' natural strengths and weaknesses and adjust their training to get the most out of them. "We get a lot of Maseratis here," Marucci said, "but we've got to fine-tune the engine a little bit and find out what's going to make them stay at that high gear."

While others have questioned S2's professed efficacy, the company is quickly expanding beyond sports and into law enforcement, the military, and even the boardroom. In the not-distant future, as the corporate hiring process grows ever more layered and as the compulsion to measure every conceivable facet of ourselves grows ever more feverish, you might be taking a version of this high-speed, highly stressful test to land your next job.

This is what brought me to Nashville. I may be genetically damned to never be a Tennessee Titan, but perhaps my test results can help propel me to become a titan of industry. Somehow, I have a slightly easier time believing that.

When I arrived at S2's brand-new, still undecorated offices this spring, I was greeted by its founders, Brandon Ally and Scott Wylie, two college athletes turned neuroscientists. After spending their early careers researching individual differences in cognitive deterioration — Ally studied Alzheimer's disease and Wylie studied Parkinson's disease — they founded S2 in 2015, deciding they could apply their work to studying individual differences in cognitive function in world-class athletes. "We are essentially working at both ends of the spectrum, from breakdown to elite expression of cognitive systems," Ally says.

They drew interest for their work with quarterbacks, who often need to be the quickest thinkers on the football field. The difference between throwing a touchdown and taking a brutal sack could be that extra tenth of a second the QB takes to see patterns developing downfield. To gauge whether a QB has the brainpower to handle the pressure and noise, S2 has designed a sequence of tests to measure their reaction time, impulse control, and processing speed, among other traits.

By 2016, S2 had found a hungry market in the NFL. For general managers, drafting and trading players are high-stakes decisions, with up to hundreds of millions of dollars — and the managers' own jobs — on the line. Selecting the wrong quarterback can set a franchise back years, while nabbing the next Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson (neither of whom was the first quarterback drafted in his class) can catapult a team to year-after-year Super Bowl contention. Small wonder teams would pay a king's ransom for a test that promises to give them an edge in knowing which quarterback to draft out of college or sign in free agency.

For many years, the standard-bearer for evaluating the brains of NFL athletes was the Wonderlic, a short IQ test with a series of increasingly difficult questions. While the test is still used in the corporate world, often as part of the interview process, it has largely fallen out of favor in pro sports as research has indicated its scores are not statistically correlated with athletic performance. The Wonderlic has also been criticized as perpetuating racial and socioeconomic biases.

"We are always living under the ghost of the Wonderlic," Ally says. "People think whatever's between the ears is all sort of the same thing — that it's all IQ." For S2, he says, it's a marketing challenge as much as anything to convince prospective clients that "there are things in the brain, and that the brain does, that can correlate to performance in sports." John Michel, an associate professor of management and organizations at Loyola University Maryland who has extensively studied the efficacy of testing in workplaces, agrees there's a distinction. While the Wonderlic, he says, assesses only crystallized intelligence ("How well can you remember something you've learned?"), the S2 gauges fluid intelligence ("How well can you observe multiple objects moving at once in space? How well can you keep track of things?").

Can a test designed for pass rushers and designated hitters really help companies evaluate candidates and fast-track potential executives?

But not everyone is convinced that S2 is a magic bullet. In April 2023, an independent reporter published leaked test results from the Ohio State quarterback C.J. Stroud, then favored to be the first player selected in the NFL draft, over the Alabama quarterback Bryce Young. The report indicated that Stroud had bombed the S2, scoring in the 18th percentile, while Young scored in the 98th. One week later, Young was drafted first overall, and Stroud fell to second. But then Stroud, the alleged dolt, went on to have one of the best rookie campaigns of any NFL quarterback, while Young struggled all year. Headlines flooded in calling the S2 the second coming of the Wonderlic, or an outright sham.

While S2 won't publicly talk about the details of Stroud's results, Ally said Stroud's reported score was "not legit." Stroud himself seemed to admit he didn't give the test his full effort: "Some things I apply myself to, some things I don't," he told The Athletic.

Still, the backlash has continued into this year. In February, the prominent sports agency Athletes First, which represents Stroud, the Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and many other top players, instructed its clients to skip cognitive evaluations including the S2 and Athletic Intelligence Quotient, a rival test.

At the S2 office, it was time for me to take the test. Unlike the Wonderlic, the S2 isn't anything like a standardized exam: It's a rapid-fire battery of pressure-filled visual simulations that require split-second decision-making, conducted on a gaming laptop or Xbox console connected to a hypersensitive keypad. "I don't care if you have Einsteinian-level IQ or you barely pulled a D-minus average," Wylie told me just before I began. "That's not going to help you."

We agreed I wouldn't divulge the specifics of the test, but I'll say that there are eight five-minute modules: One evaluates your perception speed, another your tracking ability, and another your abilities to intuit a pattern on the fly. Many of them involve dots flying around a screen or flashing before your eyes, and demand an instant reactions by clicking a button or pressing an arrow.

It was grueling, requiring intense concentration and locked-in vision. I wasn't on a football field with 300-pound linemen protecting me from shifty edge rushers, but I felt the pressure. There were moments when I felt completely in the zone, and others when some subconscious impulse led my button-mashing prowess astray. By the end I felt exhausted, and I was certain I'd failed.

Unfazed by the controversy over Stroud, S2 has begun selling its tests to other sectors. The several law-enforcement agencies and special operations military groups it has partnered with so far feel like a natural extension: People in both fields often require the same high-pressure, split-second decision-making skills as athletes.

But the company's expansion into corporate settings is a more significant departure. Can a test originally designed for pass rushers and designated hitters really help companies, as S2 claims it can, evaluate outside talent, invest in worker training, and fast-track potential executives?

For many metrics-intensive corporations, S2's testing isn't all that different from what they've been using to assess candidates for decades. IQ tests and personality tests like the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram have long been deployed to evaluate candidates' aptitude, intelligence, and cultural fit. Many of the world's top companies, such as Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Meta, and Alphabet, already do many of the things S2 is offering, albeit by compiling teams of psychometricians or human-resources experts in bespoke assessment centers. It's no surprise, then, that Fortune 500 companies have been reaching out to S2. (The company won't disclose its nonathletic clients.)

A few years ago, S2 ran a pilot program at three companies in different industries. Wylie says it focused on evaluating employees and discussing with them, rather than their managers, how their results could help them "understand themselves a little bit better beyond just personality and group dynamics" and find ways to adjust their workflows or different roles they could move to. "If we can help every individual maximize their performance and efficiency," Wylie added, "gosh, that's just going to elevate departments, elevate teams." The S2 team learned that some workers were more sensitive than others about what they wanted their employers to know about them.

When Ally and Wylie evaluate so-called corporate athletes — a term that makes even them cringe a bit, though they nevertheless use — they look at dynamic memory systems, including explicit and implicit memory (think recall versus intuition), and executive cognitive systems (such as impulse control and risk-taking). Some of these have crossover with a pro athlete's skill set, while others fall outside.

Michel says a fluid-intelligence test like the S2 could be helpful in deciding whether a candidate would make the right hire or whether an employee is right for a managerial role, but only as part of a suite of tests and reviews of their work product, or as a way to narrow down a large pool of interview candidates.

Wylie and Ally also say their tests should work in tandem with other evaluations. After all, perhaps there's no bigger red flag for a prospective employee than when your future employer relies on one metric to say whether you're a fit or not, whether you can handle the work and live up to expectations. I know I'd be turned off.

After finishing my test, I nervously trudged down the hall to a conference room, where Wylie had my results displayed on a laptop screen. To my surprise, he was smiling.

It turned out that my tracking capacity — my ability to follow movements around a screen — was less than stellar. Among NFL prospects, I would have scored in the 6th percentile. My perception speed was fairly average (48th) and my impulse control above average (84th).

But in instinctive learning — in which I had to trust my gut, figure out a pattern, and stick with it despite distractions being thrown my way — I somehow scored in the 97th percentile. "Most people get up and say, oh man, that was tough," Wylie said. "You actually deduced the optimal responses very quickly, very efficiently. A lot of our general managers crush that."

Earlier I had told Wylie that I was easily distractible and often struggled to focus. But then I scored in the 98th percentile on the distraction-control test. "I don't care what you say: When you want to lock in and block out distractions, you can," Wylie said

Perhaps, it's time for me, as a worker, to amend my environment so I can find better ways to remove distractions and lock in. When I finally do that, NFL front offices should give me a call. I won't need the tracking ability of an NFL safety watching a play unfold in front of him, but maybe I can run a franchise.