Kalogiannidis, a mechanical engineer with wide-ranging corporateexperience, offers tips and hacks for dealing with corporate inductive reasoning tests.

The author begins his book by warning readers that many top companies, including Audi, Scania, and Mercedes-Benz, have added standardized inductive reasoning quizzes to the battery of challenges they present to prospective new hires. Many applicants face these tests completely unprepared. Kalogiannidis, who says that he’s “completed, with astonishing results, multiple online psychometric evaluations,” provides many sample tests and an array of  what he calls “foolproof” strategies that are designed to guarantee excellent performance: “Inductive reasoning tests are often perceived as measures of one’s IQ, which is partially true,” he reveals. “However, the real purpose of the test is to evaluate one's ability to perform complex tasks under high-stress conditions.” These tasks often involve sequences of shapes in various patterns—changing positions, amounts, or colors, for example, as they proceed—and test-takers must predict the next image in the sequence. The puzzles are created by using algorithms that steadily adapt to the test-taker’s level of skill. This can, of course, be intimidating for prospective new hires, particularly those who’ve never encountered psychometric tests before; in response to this, Kalogiannidis fills his pages with numerous full-color examples in which the author presents the problems, and then walks readers through the key visual elements in order to reveal solutions: “As you can observe, in each new frame, a new triangle is added to the existing structure in each row. Most accurately, the triangle is added in the clockwise direction.”

This illustrated guidebook’s comprehensive detail is impressive throughout. Kalogiannidis not only supplies endless variations, but also effectively uses words and images to focus the reader’s attention on specific pathways to each answer. At first glance, many of the tests will seem bewildering, without any obvious solution. This book’s approach is geared to disarm that first reaction and to acquaint readers with the nuances of the patterns at work. Some of the author’s advice will be familiar to anyone who’s taken a standardized test before: Don’t let anxiety hamper performance, and don’t waste valuable time on tougher sections at the cost of easier ones that can be completed more readily, and so on. However, Kalogiannidis also excels at offering reassurance with pragmatic tips that rethink test-taking in general, as when he encouraging readers to imaginatively “brainstorm” a solution instead of approaching it with preconceived notions—one of many moments when he quietly and confidently offers hope in order to quell anxiety. The author’s most basic advice is to mentally pull apart the patterns into components, so that one can conquer them by understanding the smaller details; when tackling a “rather complex” pattern, he advises readers to “apply a commonly used engineering practice: independently observe and study each entity within the frames.” Prospective test-takers will appreciate the learning experience, and they’ll feel significantly calmed by the notion that these tests can indeed be overcome.

An extensive and useful survey of a wide array of complex test problems.