Behavioral Interviews for New Hires?

banetbi asks: "I am a PHP developer and FreeBSD administrator, and have been looking for a new job for a couple of months. Finally, I got a call back from a company, but they want me to take an on-line questionnaire before I come in for an interview. After doing some research I found the company that makes the test and checked out their website. It looks like this is some sort of personality test (they call it an artificially intelligent behavioral analysis). What does my personality have to do with my ability to perform in a job? Have any of you had to take a personality test to get a job? Should I do it, or just keep looking?"

Comments

fact of interviewing life these days.

[yagu]

Behavioral and Personality Type tests are becoming almost standard for larger companies (read, ones that can afford them). Whether or not they add value is debatable, and whether you should "move on" obviously will be a personal choice. If it's a job you really want, you probably should consider taking it.

I don't consider these tests harmless, especially since many companies allow too much weight to the results. I wonder how many industry leaders today would get "passing" results.

All that said, if you're interested in what they're looking for and some info on why, and what you might do to improve your results visit this site.

For a perspective from the "hiring" side, you might want to look at this article.

Also, here's an article that describes what behavioral interviews/tests are. It claims (I won't agree or disagree):

..., behavior-based interviews are said to be 55 percent predictive of future on-the-job behavior, while traditional interviews are only 10 percent predictive. They can help hiring managers get more objective information about a candidate's job-related skills, abilities, interest and motivation, and make more accurate hiring decision. Currently, 30 percent of all organizations are using behavioral interviews to some degree.

It's mostly voodoo garbage (no offense to voodoo practicers) but is a fact of life in the interviewing world.

Re:Your personality is tested *regardless*...

[bhsurfer]

My company routinely gives personality tests to all new sales applicants. I suspect they use it more to corroborate impressions from interviews than as an actual "pass/fail" kind of thing - the two work together in tandem.

I was given one during some management training I attended and found it to be not only somewhat interesting but also informative about the other people I was with. I was pretty suprised to see how closely the results matched the predictions. We were given the test and then given the descriptions of the 4 core areas of this test. Then before we got our scores we took turns trying to predict what each other's scores would be. It struck me as a *fairly* accurate measure - nothing to get too bent out of shape about but closer than a 45 minute interview would be.

Another potential positive about taking a test like this is that it could indicate potential to your employers that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see. If you're working in a cube all day and your bosses boss never sees you then they might not know that you're "a born problem-solver" or "a natural leader" since they never interact with you. Keep in mind that there's room for lots of different personality styles in a business, so there's nothing wrong with being "on record" as having a particular style. Successful people have lots of different personality traits - it's not like there's only one way to do things...

TMM's remark about interviews being personality tests is also 100% correct in my opinion.

Spoof it

[Marko DeBeeste]

1) Research the test. Find the "right" answers. (yes, they exist)

2) Out-doublethink them, answer in a way that seems polite, co-operative and not too self impressed.

3) NEVER NEVER use the "Stronlgy agree" or "Strongly disagree" answers, unlessit's an obvious trap

I have a degree in psych, was married to a shrink and have done graduate work in this area. It's all about as accurate as a horoscope, just anothe way to one-up you before they slip on the harness.

I had one

[macdaddy]

However my test was after my interview and after they offered me the job. It was about 3 hours long and involed 5-6 tests with lots of questions on each. The shrink that gave the test also secretly tested my test instruction following abilities. He would give me the test, give me some superfluous info about the test, then slip in instructions to take the sample questions and stop. Stop was worded differently but the meaning was to stop and no go any further. Then he'd leave you for 15 minutes. The sample tests would only take a minute or 2 and you'd end up sitting there waiting for the guy thinking that you heard that you shouldn't go ahead with the test but questioning whether you're right or not. He'd come in after 15 minutes and pretend like nothing was going on and he'd instruct you to move on with the questions. I saw a small pin-hole camera in the wall behind an large office plant as I was leaving the test room after the test. I wondered if he was watching me but that confirmed it.

Re:"Behavioural" questions at an interview

[Space cowboy]

When you come to interview with us, you'll get a day's worth of first-round interviews (between 5 and 8 in total) with a variety of different types of interviewer. Whereas I *can* ask the start-off-simple-and-drill-down technical questions, there are others whose job it is to ask that. Mine is normally to assess the character of the candidate - every interviewer has a particular role to play in our process.

I deliberately didn't give many examples of what I ask - and I tend to ask a lot of questions in an hour's interview - because as you say, there are those who prepare answers. Part of the course I went on was to help me come up with a set of my own questions that won't be typical outside my company, another part was how to deal with obviously-prepared candidates...

I personally think a candidate gets a fairly gruelling day, and if (s)he succeeds, there is the (harder) 2nd-round to look forward to, with fewer but far more in-depth interviews. All the interviewers compare notes at the end of the day for every candidate (on 1st and 2nd round interviews), and I think it would be hard for anyone to maintain a faux personality over that entire day, with different people asking similar but differently-focussed questions.

Simon.

HR / Psych usually don't understand Tech workers

[billstewart]

You can usually tell when a small company has hired a professional HR manager - there are about 100 employees, and the HR department kills the every-Friday-afternoon beer party.

I've dealt with a range of different company sizes, from the old-style huge company I've worked with to the little techie shops my friends and customers have often worked for. The folks in the HR department may have psych degrees, but they generally don't understand how tech people think, work, relate to their work, or relate to each other. They _sometimes_ have a clue about how sales people think and work, but HR people who understand techies are really rare golden folks, and you usually only run into them if they're at consulting companies brought in to help your company out of a jam.

I don't think that an HR person needs to be able to read a Java-graphics-widget-set manual to understand how a developer and tech writer talk to each other through the process, but they do need to be able to read things like "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" or at least read science fiction or have some familiarity with Monty Python or other fundamental works of our culture, as opposed to "The Inner Game of Golf" or "How To Feel Really Really Self-Motivated about Success" if they're doing HR for sales people.

HR people are usually good at dealing with employment bureaucracy - hiring rules, legal requirements, medical insurance, payroll, administering salaries in line with market trends, etc. Sometimes they're good at employee counseling, and you'll find good psych types there handling things like alcoholism or family-related stress. But how often have you seen the HR folks spending time with your department looking at the personal dynamics between people, coaching managers in how to manage the folks working for them? I'd be happy if the HR people could make sure that the resumes they forward to us are for people who understand what all the buzzwords they use mean; I guess they're mainly adding value by filtering out responses that _didn't_ include the right buzzwords, and by understanding the clues that mean "got fired from last job due to ongoing criminal activity" or checking whether they actually attended the colleges they say they did. But if they don't know how developers talk to each other, or what kinds of stories consultants tell with their clients, or what depth of math background is needed for the kinds of problems we solve, then they're seldom likely to add value by sending the ESFJs to one department and the INTPs to another, much less interpreting MMPIs in ways that are any use at all.

Nor do I usually see them forwarding that kind of information on to managers, who might like to know that one developer is an INTP who needs to be encouraged to see the value of shipping code before all possible features have been added, while another is an ISTJ who needs regular short meetings to discuss whether the tools have sufficient generality to really capture the potential user spaces before starting to write the user interfaces for it, or is an ENFP who needs to be given some critical concepts about the functionality and the capability limits so that the user interface actually supports the right features and also needs a supply of chocolate bars to bribe other developers into communicating with the documentation people.

Back in the early 80s, when Affirmative Action was becoming a social issue, we had a lot of HR types spend a lot of time with us to deal with attitudes about cultural diversity (ok, and to deal with lawsuits), and there was a lot of good psych work in some of that as well as generally useful tools for dealing with situations, not only about cultural relationships but also about getting my ISTJ football-player boss to understand different work styles. On the other hand, when the HR department comes around with courses about "Change Is Good!" and buttons saying "We're Navigating Change!", that's really a clue to get your resume in shape for the upcoming layoffs. (I did wear the button