I can't imagine any respectable firm not testing (Score 1)

After getting burned on a few hires in a software consulting services company we started testing applicants.

The test was roughly a dozen questions put together by myself and other developers. Some general knowledge, and a few more specific. The first question was an automatic fail if you missed it:

What is the integer value of 0xff?

A surprising number of people with glowing resumes would miss this, which is totally unbelievable. But without this simple test these people may have snowed us. We also had a question that was almost as simple but was compiler specific, that only a handful of people ever got right, so was almost an automatic pass.

Our hiring process was a brief company introduction, followed by the test which should have only taken about 30 minutes. If the results were positive I would interview them. If the test was aced, I could focus more on personality, otherwise the interview had to be longer to cover technical areas.

We once had a very impressive resume from a person with a complete failure on the test. I conducted the post interview just because of the paradox.

This person was very personable, had very good interviewing skills, and could adequately discuss the project history on the resume. Without the test, I would have been inclined to hire this person, and would have definitely had to later fire them.

Feedback from most people was they liked the fact that we were testing applicants, and not just filling seats. We never had to fire anybody for incompetence when we used the test.

I would never recommend a multiple guess test, and testing esoteric knowledge to see if the person has a photographic memory is pretty pointless. Good general/academic questions will weed out the posers, which is the true reason to test in the first place.

As an applicant, not only would I take the test, I would expect one. The questions and the process would tell me a lot about the company, what knowledge they may see as important, and possibly some insight into the base competency of my co-workers.

As an employer, I would write-off anybody who refused the test as someone who was a) incapable, or b) missing desired personality traits, win-win!