How Singularity works
HireVue’s research paper defines Singularity as an attention task that requires players to identify a unique shape amongst increasing numbers of distractor shapes, and with a decreasing number of unique features of the target shape. Two things change as you climb, then: there are more shapes to search, and the one you want differs from the rest in fewer ways.
There is no rule to work out, as there would be in an inductive reasoning test. The unique shape is defined by its own features, so the task is to spot it, quickly and correctly, while the field gets more crowded.
Like HireVue’s other cognitive games, Singularity runs for a fixed time, three minutes, on a ladder that moves you up for a win and down for a loss, capped at level 100. Levels are generated uniquely for each candidate, and HireVue says game colours come from colour-blind-friendly palettes.
What HireVue’s research says about it
Singularity was not one of the two games in the scoring model HireVue’s paper describes; that model used Numerosity and Shapedance. It appears in two later studies instead.
In a study of 85 panellists who played four HireVue games, each game was scored as highest level multiplied by share of levels won. Singularity correlated 0.67 with the combined score, the lowest of the four, and overlapped most with Shapedance (0.44) and least with Numerosity and Pathfinder (0.30 each).
In live hiring, the paper reports 4,778 applicants for technical graduate roles such as IT at a large consulting firm in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, who played Singularity with Numerosity and Shapedance as one package. They rated the experience 4.30 out of 5 for overall satisfaction, and the package scored a Net Promoter Score of 58.
How it is scored
HireVue has not published level statistics or feature weights for Singularity the way it has for Numerosity and Shapedance. What it does say about all its cognitive games is that they record the highest level completed, the ratio of levels won to lost, and the total levels played. The research study above used highest level times win ratio as a summary; that is a research score, not necessarily what an employer sees.
As with HireVue’s other games, there is no published pass mark, and HireVue says candidates are compared only with others in their own country or region.
How our practice version works
Our Singularity shows a field of shapes and asks you to tap the one that is different; a single tap commits the level. The field grows from 6 shapes to 24 as you climb, and the unique shape starts out differing on three features, then two, then one. The features are form, colour, size, fill and rotation, and higher up the ladder the shapes start to move.
The clock is three minutes and the ladder caps at 100. We move you up two levels for a win and down one for a loss, and our difficulty stops rising at about level 34. Both are our choices: HireVue publishes only the direction of the ladder, and no average level for Singularity, so 34 is our estimate rather than a published figure. A pause button stops our clock.