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Personality Testing For Employment
Thelasko writes "While I was in college, I had the opportunity to take an elective course in Industrial Psychology. One section of the course covered hiring practices and the validity of 'personality testing' to screen applicants (Google link for non-subscribers). The Wall Street Journal has a long article discoursing on how such tests are used in today's economy. While personality tests may be designed to uncover underlying personality traits such as honesty, critics claim that the tests instead reward cheaters." The article talks mostly about the tests' use in winnowing candidates for retail positions — deciding whom to interview. Anybody encountered them in an IT or more technical context?
Companies that have formalized tests of personality might be opening themselves up for a discrimination lawsuit, unless there is a way to map personality type to a tangible requirement for the job. (IANAL.)
Real life rewards cheaters. See the Bailout, or your average middle-management.
Thusly, the test is completely accurate.
"critics claim that the tests instead reward cheaters" The critics wouldn't moan if they could cheat as well as these apparent cheaters.
Many years ago, I took one of those for a Sales job at Sears, an ethics test. The thing was completely worthless; Anyone with an IQ over 90 could have figured out the "correct" answers. Basically, suggest harsh punishment for any crimes, admit to committing one minor offense as a child and feeling guilty about it, and deny ever having broken a law since.
In high school I took one for an avation class. Apparently pilots are required to take them. (?) That was a test of my sanity and equally easy to figure out. It consisted of tests like "you just killed a man. Why?" and the trick was to admit equally to each of four possible psychological problems so you look balanced. God forbid a smart lunatic or a smart criminal take those tests.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I was given a couple of these at a company I applied to some years ago (a hi-tech job). I took them on condition they'd show me the results, which they were fine with doing. Nice guys, but kind of a creepy outfit. Amusingly, I scored slightly above normal in the hostility department (my inward reaction to that was "Who you callin' hostile, m___f___r?"). But they took all that in stride and offered me a job, which I didn't take.
Google makes you take a looooooong and in depth personality test just to apply for an IT position. It's really insulting.
P.S. Fuck you, Google. Didn't want to work for you anyway. Put that in your personality test.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Here's something I thought was an exellent example of HR people tend to think (copied from here):
1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room.
2. Put your new hires in the room and close the door.
3. Leave them alone and come back after six hours.
4. Then analyze the situation.
a. If they are counting the bricks, put them in the Accounting Department.
b. If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.
c. If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering.
d. If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning.
e. If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations.
f. If they are sleeping, put them in Security.
g. If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.
h. If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.
i. If they say they have tried different combinations and they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.
j. If they have already left for the day, put them in Management.
k. If they are staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning.
l. If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Top Management.
m. Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard from, put them in Congress.
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
"If you found a stranger "making out" in the park would you inform the authorities?"
I answered "Yes" and that's what the hiring team wanted to hear. If I had answered "No," then this team would assume that I would engage in similar activity if I were in a place that I am not known.
"Making out" here, was intentionally phrased that way to keep it vague, but we all know what it means right?
I got the job, though I quit seven months later because this job was had began to run my life, something I loathed with a passion.
Given that these tests have if not methodological history, then atleast spirtual ancestry in stuff like the MBTI(tm) test, which is horribly flawed in it's concept and methodology, I'm pretty skeptical of these tests. these tests really only weed out the obscenely stupid or inept. Which I guess where they succeed, but I'm also wondering if they weed out honest and capable individuals. Although if you can't do some googling and get an answer in an IT context, maybe you shouldn't get that job as an admin or support rep.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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I have been advocating Industrial Pyschological Profiling for almost 20 years as a means of filtering out unsuitable people for key IT positions. The logic is simple: As an employer, yoiu cannot ask all of the real meaningful questions that allow you to get to know them - P.C. rules. With IT staff often holding the keys to the kingdom, understanding what makes them tick is essential to well managed security and policy enforcement. What we care about is proclivity, tendancies, allegiances, and underlying character issues that can be quickly and easily determined (on a plus/minus scale...). These data then become a critical HR, security and management metric when hiring for key positions. I am a huge fan of the technique, and have been involved with various training experts and sessions on how to use this technique with specific application to I.T., critical infrastructure, finance etc.
Winn Schwartau
That sounds like a perfectly logical application of personality testing.
I think we should give the politicians similar treatments. This new era should be the end of treating them as royalties.
I suggest, not personality tests, but psychological tests in an attempt to make sure thy are not sociopaths, which I understand now can be medically tested for as well. Often employees are tested for drug, IQ and soon maybe genetic screening.
Politicians do make decisions that impact not only our country, but depending on their title, the whole world...
Do something, that is if you are a real patriot or even care slightly about the worlds future...
But that's an other story...
Good luck to all
Companies that have formalized tests of personality might be opening themselves up for a discrimination lawsuit, unless there is a way to map personality type to a tangible requirement for the job. (IANAL.)
There are federal laws banning the use of polygraphs in interviews, but this type of thing is VERY similar.
These personality tests are, imho, worse then polygraphs.
Polygraphs only determine if you lie or feel discomfort, but these tests determine whether you conform to some arbitrary personality type.
"rejected from e-harmony" commercial anyone?
Apparently not being a blithe, extroverted yes-man on some arbitrary test now means you can't get a job.
Talk about social darwinism.
I've taken very similar tests on sites which give ME the results and it shows that, while I possess many good qualities, my reserved nature makes me hard for others to read, particularly in that my expression of happiness or enthusiasm are externally muted.
In fact, my personality type is represented by 0.003% of the population.
I'm a pessimist and an introvert. This does NOT interfere with my ability to put on a professional face and be friendly to clients, but it does cause a great deal of stress when a potential job is at stake. Further, being a pessimist, while many people frown on it, has many positive qualities in a work environment, such as a propensity to properly assess and prepare for likely hurdles on a project.
This doesn't matter though, as the slightest sign of discomfort or non-conformity is construed as some kind of black mark.
Job ad says "we need free thinkers", personality test says "sorry you don't meet the 99.99999999% match we require with our VP's personality." Interestingly the most brilliant and talented people tend to be eccentric. A classic example of mediocrity rising to the top... except now only mediocrity is allowed in the door period.
The academic equivalent would be someone being passed up who knows their stuff but doesn't test well, while an incompetent who's good at telling people what they want to hear gets top marks.
I would also like to know if this falls afoul of discrimination laws.
Your personality is far more deeply ingrained than your religion. You should not be disqualified because of it unless you are severely psychologically impaired.
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The one I really liked was the one in the movie "The Game"...
You just can't beat the Consumer Recreation Services' true/false test with items like "I frequently hurt small animals." and "I feel guilty when I masturbate."
For some summer jobs I was applying for in high school. Turns out Acme Markets was looking for people who could work well with others.
I too took Industrial Psychology, and some other psychology courses as well. I remember that two of the courses covered the subject of "personality testing", and nearly all the material and cases we covered criticized the use of personality testing for any kind of serious use, as being notoriously unreliable.
For example, my professors (and our course material) taught me that some corporations still use one or another form of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), or tests derived from it, for personality testing prospective employees and so on. In the words of one professor: "This test and similar tests were thoroughly discredited over 20 years ago. It is astounding that anybody would still give them credence."
But apparently some still do.
Some personality tests are easy to figure out, which indeed rewards cheaters. Others use various levels of trickery to try to combat cheating (multiple, modified forms of the same question scattered throughout the test, for example), which rewards the more intelligent cheaters. And so on. Often the tests are biased culturally, and some of them still in use are so old that their wording, assumptions, and scoring are questionable today.
In short, I would look at personality tests for pre-employment screening the same way I look at drug testing and standard polygraphs: If you are an "innocent" person, you should NEVER volunteer to do these things. They do absolutely nothing to help your situation, and all you can do is lose. Statistically, they are also biased toward false positives more than false negatives, and the odds are not in your favor. And finally, I thoroughly despise the "guilty until proven innocent" attitude that is firmly set by the use of these tests when there is no prior suspicion of wrongdoing or problems. It sends the wrong message to employees, and their families, and their children.
Informal personality tests are often administered by women to gauge males' employability as a boyfriend/husband.
This often doesn't go well for those in "an IT or more technical context"
Research tests that are supposed to judge sociological phenomena, designed to be issued to mass numbers of people for data, are being sold to employers as tools to judge individuals. It simply doesn't work that way. Might as well use Astrology....
I am deeply convinced (a euphemism for "I have no proof") that most of this nonsense is driven by the fact that a lot of today's management does not understand the subject matter of what they manage; therefore, they cannot appropriately interview candidates. Instead, they engage in meaningless "personality tests" and other psychobabble, which is mostly what they learn during ever-popular "management" (read, "I-have-no-aptitude-for-science") studies.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Somehow I misspelt excellent, and forgot the word "how"...
Here's something I thought was an excellent example of how HR people tend to think.
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
I don't know about personality testing, but IBM once had an aptitude test (and it still might) called IPATO. It was a ridiculous exercise, and required one to perform arbitrary matrix operations in one's head within a finite amount of time. I'd be curious if anyone on these forums has gone through this bizarre process ... Here's a summary taken from an internal IBM site (does not appear to be available publicly):
Glossary IPAT/IPATO - Information Processing Aptitude Test
The Information Processing Aptitude Test (IPAT) is currently administered to US job applicants for Band 6 positions in Job Families 01, 02, 03, 04 and 06 which consist of Software Engineer, Information Technology Support, Hardware/Development Engineer, Other Engineer and IT Architect/Specialist positions. The IPAT (which measures reasoning and predicts the ability to rapidly learn and process complex information) is intended to be used as part of the Total Assessment of applicants being considered for these positions.
Implemented in 1987, the IPAT is used by IBM in over 20 countries worldwide and available in 10 languages. The original validation study for the IPAT showed that IPAT test scores were the best single predictor of success in training and job performance when compared to other single predictors including Grade Point Average (GPA). This original study also showed that the IPAT was a fair test for minorities. The Global Selection Team, Talent Management and Delivery, revalidated the IPAT in July 1999. The results of this study confirmed the finding of the original validation study: higher IPAT scores predict higher probability of job success. The results also indicate that the IPAT continues to outperform Grade Point Average (GPA) as a predictor of job performance. An additional validation study was completed in July, 2000 for Hardware/Development/Other Engineers with highly similar results. In 2002 a study was conducted which extended the use of the test for applicants to technical co-op positions (Job Families 01, 02, 03, 04, and 06).
The IPAT was redesigned in 2001-2002 to allow online administration. The redesigned test was designated Information Processing Aptitude Test Online (IPATO) and was first implemented in the US in 2002 (currently available in 19 countries, 6 languages). Because of this, significant redesign to the test and its administration were made, IBM's Global Selection Team conducted a study to (re)validate the IPATO. Results from the 2004 study again confirmed the IPATO to be a strong predictor of job success - - higher IPATO scores indicated higher probability of job success.
Given IBM's commitment to hiring based on total assessment, it is important that managers give proper consideration to all relevant job-related factors. If a manager wishes to make an offer to a candidate whose IPATO score is below average (as indicated on the Test Results Sheet provided by Talent Delivery), he or she should ensure that there are other clear, job-related compensating factors that support this decision. Compensating factors may include specific technical knowledge, outstanding communication or demonstrated leadership skills.
In addition, if a manager does not wish to extend an offer to an applicant whose IPATO score is considerably above average, there should be clear job-related reasons for that decision as well.
I was applying to a separate division of a company my mother works for
She is considered the best in her department, and even the VP's worship the ground she walks on.
She helped with the test!
I never got a reply!
The conclusion: personality/ "unicru" style tests would easily reject the best workers, and If she had applied today as opposed to when she came in 20 years ago she would never have graced their department!
Came off as a lot of BS to me. At least the way it was presented. Every so often there would be a sprinkling of foundational psych in there, but most of the time it's just a matter of exploiting believed trends for the purpose of hiring efficiency.
Personality tests simply serve as a quick way for organizations to screen out candidates who likely don't have the traits desired for the position. Those remaining don't necessarily posses them either, but it is more likely that they do.
The problem is that personality tests don't tell you much about a person's ability to actually perform a job (granted you'd hope that some effort would be put in to uncover this). It also greatly over simplifies the complexities of the human personality. That and there's the whole business with test taker honesty and bias.
What it can do is possibly screen out candidates who have extreme traits that generally aren't desirable on any job.
I was recently turned down by a recruiting company when they discovered that I had 2 DWIs (both of which were 10+ years old) and 2 weapon possession cases (one of which was legitimate, the other was total bullshit that I signed a plea-bargain on so I wouldn't have to sit out the time and lose my job).
Now, personality tests aren't a big worry to me. I'm pretty crazy (by "normal" standards) but intelligent and diligent, so not only do I make a good (if outspoken) employee, but I figured out a long time ago how to manipulate psychological tests. I did it as a teenager, when I was incarcerated in numerous state institutions. If I wanted out of the place, I just picked the answers that made me sound as sane and healthy as an indoctrinated drone. If I wanted to beat a criminal case on grounds of insanity (that's the shortened term for it), I simply picked answers that would make sense for the given situation.
Human beings are pattern-recognizing creatures by nature. And the more intelligent a person is, the more aware of a situation they are and the easier it becomes for them to manipulate a test.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
we DON'T all know what that means. "Making out" as a phrase is terminally vague, and could mean many different things to many different people. That is precisely why these tests are so worthless: they presume to test things based on information that is not just imperfect, but horribly distorted as well.
"I got the job, though I quit seven months later because this job was had began to run my life, something I loathed with a passion."
Hint: I have heard that Google is "the exception that proves the rule", but in general, if a company asked me to take a personality test prior to employment, I would walk out the door and not come back. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I know just how much bullshit these tests really are. If you are a good person, you should never take one, because unless it is one of those awesomely simple-minded tests, it can only make you look worse than if you had not taken one in the first place.
As far as I'm concerned, it simply punishes the extremely stupid.
If you can't even figure out how a "good employee" would answer for most of the questions, then I highly suspect you stand little chance of actually being one.
Except you have NO IDEA how a "good employee" would answer.
Policies differ from company to company, department to department, and even in sub-departmental work units.
This type of material should be covered in training.
It's like demanding a medical school applicant perform cutting edge neuro-surgery in order to be accepted.
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Out of curiousity, did your father ever encounter a candidate that was both patient and dogged enough to deal with the BS questions, and sharp enough to snap to it when faced with a real problem? There are people like that. I'm energetic but astute, so unless I was faced with 2^10 basic math questions, I think the test would be easy to beat.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
I worked for a place that gave interviewees - right down to the front desk secretary - an IQ test.
I was hired as part of a sort of package deal (they were stuck with me regardless of IQ, lol) but I found it incredibly scary that this company judged their employees by an IQ test.
For the record, the employees at this company were no brighter than at any other company I've worked for. I had lunches stolen by employees, and the top non-C-level earner in the company was a wreck, taking just about every medication in the book to keep up with the stress. In fact, the company was almost universally hated by the people who worked there, but the pay seemed to be sufficient for them to stay.
What the IQ test came down to was, the guy at the top who was administering the test was constantly reminding everyone in private that he hadn't met someone yet who had a higher score than him. He was defending his little piece of ground, pyschologically speaking. And he was the type that, had he met someone with an IQ higher than him, he probably wouldn't let that person alone until he found a deep character flaw or piece of trivia they didn't know about.
The company had previously gone through related lawsuits, so it's surprising that the collective ego of those at the top was so great that even such a poor hiring policy escaped scrutiny.
Personality testing strikes me as a rather good idea, but it also seems to indicate that corporations are firmly planted in afraid-to-fire-people land now.
and assuming that I were alone in the desert with scant food or water, my answer would be "drink its blood, and eat the rest".
That is a completely sane and eminently practical answer. Oh, and "keep its shell for future collection of water."
But I'll bet you just about anything that is not the answer they want to hear. They would rather see you dehydrate and starve, as long as you are "warm-hearted" and "ethical" about it.
An employer could try this tack:
"Take this test on your own. We find that most of our long-time employees tend to score this way. If you score differently, be prepared to work with people who scored this way. We've found that people who score some other way tend to have problems including this, this, and this. If you scored some other way please take that into consideration before applying."
This will deter some of the employees who are probably going to be high-turnover or high-maintenance, which will save the company some money. There will be some false-positives of course, but if it's designed well it will be a net benefit for the company, and determined or hungry applicants won't be automatically turned away.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Those kind of tests are not so common in my country (though I has been a while since I looked for a new job).
It was in 2002 and it had nothing identifiable as "X" or "Y" test. It was just a bunch of questions which you replied in another sheet (it was "yes" and "no" AFAIR).
The curious thing is that you had to connect (graphically, with a line.. like "yes" goes to the right and "no" to the left) an answer to another.
Apparently the psychological evaluation was done in the form of the resulting curve/shape of the global vertical line.
Back then I badly needed a job and my CV was not that impressive (I was not hired BTW). If it were today, I would simply say "please discard my CV" and walk away.
weed out honest and capable individuals. See the question about the toroise above.
Amusingly, I scored slightly above normal in the hostility department (my inward reaction to that was "Who you callin' hostile, m___f___r?"). But they took all that in stride and offered me a job, which I didn't take.
You made me almost fall out of my chair. Funny stuff ...
I was offered a job at my current work *after* I passed the interview, but before I could sign the paperwork.
I found it a bit strange that I sat in an interview, impressed them enough to get hired, and then they - what? wanted to know if I was an axe murderer?
The one question that stuck in my mind was "Have you ever felt so angry you thought you couldn't control your violent actions?". Seriously WTF? I would have thought that was covered in "No I don't have any violent crime convictions..."
I like it where I work though. Great company - but that psych test was amongst the wierdest set of questions I've ever been asked.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
My father, a civil engineer, once worked for a Phoenix company that employed another kind of test--long, pointless, exhausting tests and interview questions for candidates, followed at the end of the day with one or two questions that were actually important. He, too, was in a hiring position, and informed that it was "all about wearing them down" so they would give honest responses at the end out of sheer impatience with the process.
Part of the reason for those long exhausting personality tests is repetition.
Important questions are repeated with the question/answer slightly changed. If you're 'cheating' (aka lying) then it is likely you won't give consistent answers and it shows up as a giant red flag when the answers are being evaluated.
Of course, none of that matters when the testing procedure flawed. I.E. I've done monolithic personality tests where you can flip back and look at your answers. A proper test is broken up into sections that get taken away when you've completed them.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
is that you would be replacing one unworkable system with another system that is not useful for what it is supposed to be for. Why bother to trade in a poorly-working system, for one that works at least equally poorly? You do not gain anything thereby.
Specifically, personality tests are: (1) Notoriously unreliable. All too often they do not measure what they claim to measure. (2) Transparent. Most of these tests can be answered dishonestly by people with a little bit of intelligence, further distorting the results. (3) Because of (1) and (2), they have a tendency to weed out good and honest people. (4) They set a "guilty until innocent" tone in the workplace.
There is more, but I won't go on. If the tests were actually reliable, I might might change my mind about them. But they are not.
In the mid-1990s IBM hired me as a software engineer straight from university.
They gave you the job application, urine test, and this test after they made the decision to hire me. It was like "you have to do this, so just do it" The test was so easy that 99% of technical 4-year-degree graduates would pass it with flying colors and a good number of them would max it out.
Oh, the piss test was easy too. They gave you plenty of notice.
Information gathered from personality tests should be used by intelligent managers in order to maximize the potential of their subordinates by playing to their strengths? Using the information to screen out certain individuals could be useful in some _very specific_ situations, sure. Generally speaking though, it is just misuse of valuable information that thus educated person would apply in their management practices.
You do not ask an Idealist to proofread your financial documents, you do not ask a Pragmatic person to make long term strategic plans and you certainly are not going to get anything from a Realist if you ask them to brainstorm. Knowing how someone constructs their thoughts is _invaluable_. What does not do much good, however, is filtering your candidates to only one type. You are only asking for failure there, as every personality/thinking type has its vices.
Every single type.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
waaaaa
try the USMLE if you want a REAL test
I applied for a job that required a personality test and lied on it supplying the "correct" answers. I was hired. My sister took one and was truthful about it. Stating "no" to the question "if you forgot to pay for a movie ticket would you go back after the movie and pay for it." She was not hired.
This is a real world example of a personality test rewarding dishonesty.
... if it used "properly". By that, I mean to get an idea of where to put the person. However, to judge the "quality" or "employability" of someone based on these personality profiles is not a smart idea IMHO.
Any "good" can be translated as a "bad" (and vice versa) depending on the environment and situation one is put in. I think any good company needs a range of diverse people and those people need to be placed in the appropriate environments. This could mean something as simple as the right manager, or not giving someone who is scattered mundane tasks ... or the like.
These tests really should be in place to better understand your fellow employees. Unfortunately, I doubt the metrics from these tests are not used responsibly in many places.
Extremely well put.
If raw statistics had predictive value for specific cases, I could make a lot of money flipping coins.
There are actually several validation techniques that you can use to do just that. Personality actually has a moderate but fairly consistent relationship with job performance across most job types.
The problem is that the shinyness surrounding personality in the business world these days makes a lot of organizations think that they can just write some questions about the kind of people they like, throw that into an online test, and hope for the best. This does not work, and is not usually legally defensible.
Also - discrimination is legal. Hiring someone with more work experience is discriminatory in nature. Discriminating against a protected class is not. But generally speaking, as long as the results of the personality test do not correlate with membership in a protected group (race, color, religion, sex, or national origin - see Title VII), or predict job performance differently between members of the various classes, then that is not a concern.
This is actually hotly debated amongst industrial psychologists.
Vendors of personality tests include items that "detect" patterns of responses that appear to be due to this kind of cheating. They then look at these cheaters (the ones who are purposefully answer how a "good employee" would answer instead of with their own tendencies) and check their level of job performance. Oddly enough, there is a correlation - people who pad their responses to look like a "good employee" also tend to have higher job performance ratings, at least as it appears to their supervisors.
if it worked. The sad fact is that there are IQ tests out there today whose results are fairly accurate and repeatable... but there are no readily available "objective" personality tests that can claim the same thing.
Now... understand that there is a huge amount of debate about just what IQ is, and what it is good for, what it predicts... but the accurate and repeatable measuring of it has become something of a science.
The same cannot be said for personality testing.
There is no spiritual ancestry in modern personality testing with the MBTI - it lacks the psychometric properties required of tests these days (reliability and validity). It is still used because the creators still want to make money off of it. Few industrial psychologists with any decent statistical training would be caught dead using it.
An example of a modern personality test that is currently used (and has been successfully legally defended) is the NEO-PI-R. Scores on several scales in this measure have been demonstrated to correlate with job performance across a variety of jobs.
There was a "personality" test I had to take when I was a clerk for Radio Shack back in college... I remember the manager showed me the "results" and it basically said, "This person is either a very good person, or understood this test enough to give the answers we hoped for."
The purpose of the test is to select those who will put with bullshit as part of the hiring process. On my list for automatic DQ of employer are:
Most types of "H.R." B.S.
Resume in Word document.
Provide salary history.
Clueless (is there any other type of?) recruiter.
Buzzword laden job description.
No identification of who or what the business is.
Since I run my own business I can say
1. I probably don't want to work for you anyway.
2. Fuck you!
after all every single performance review at a company like this will continue to do so for the rest of time.
Honestly, I take very little stock in these bullshit personality tests at work. I typically have made up my mind to hire you or not in less than a minute after I started talking with you. Some of my best and most reliable employees are homeless scumbags that I let take showers in the chemical sink when we are closed, and some of my worst employees, and the ones that I fire the most, are 'normal' people who would have scored well on the test.
That sounds like a company correctly testing a personality measure that they are considering adapting in the future, even if the test itself wasn't very good. This is one of the ways to ensure a test will be legally defensible - have every new employee take it, but don't hire them based on it. Then see if the personality test scores correlate with their job performance (usually as measured by supervisors) at some time later.
When I was trying to get a job in teaching, the hardest jobs to apply for were the ones that used a personality screening. I never got past that, it was obvious why -- the test was looking for suck-ups and yes-men, teachers who would do exactly what the principal said, and never rock the boat.
And isn't that one of the problems with education today? Not to brag, but I guarantee that I was in the 98th or higher percentile on my Praxis tests. But I know for a fact that other teaching students with me got jobs teaching math while I barely got interviews. People that barely can follow along with the book are going to do a better job of showing the joy of mathematics than I am? When the school is selecting for sheep and not smarts, what kind of teacher do they get? What kind of school do they get? And what kind of "educated" students do we turn out? Shit, shit and shit, of course.
----- Why sig when you can sign? PGP key id 7675D05E
Back in the 90's I got a job working for company that produced pre-employment tests. They sold them as separate "instruments": the core test that was meant to measure honesty and several other add-ons that covered things like drug use, customer service, math skills, etc.
The honesty test asked questions like "if you knew a relative was stealing from their employer would you report them." The drug test asked straight-up questions about how often you did particular illegal drugs. Any admission of drug use would fail you.
I had to take that test and the drug test to get the job and had no problem, even though I absolutely lied my way through most of it.
I would get into arguments with the staff psychologists about how easy it was to fake but they would always pull out the chart showing the neat bell curve of passes and fails based on hundreds of real test results.
I then concluded that the test was actually a veiled intelligence test. If you failed you must be stupid, either that or you were too honest to get the job.
I first saw this in the early 90's or so. Text included, to avoid melting the server (which I don't believe is canonical anyway)
http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/Hacker/interview.php
* "How do you work in a team situation when all the other team members are fools and idiots?" /var/spool/mail only) can a Sun 600MP server serve simultaneously, and what relation does this have to angels and pinheads?"
* "How well do you program under the influence of hard drugs?"
* "Have you ever beaten or killed a co-worker?"
* "Give me a rough estimate of the maximum dollar amount that you've stolen from each of your previous employers."
* "Do you object to bullwhips in the workplace?"
* "Emacs or vi?"
* "You have a large network of Suns being used by secretaries for word processing in FrameMaker. Which GNU packages would you install for your own entertainment, and how would you justify them later?"
* "You see a wounded puppy bleeding and whimpering on the side of the road while you're running to work to fix a downed computer that tens of users are waiting for. Do you let the puppy die?" "Why not?"
* "How much of your workday would you waste by reading news?"
* "Recite the GNU Manifesto."
* "How many clients (30% diskless, 60% dataless, 10%
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Because what you're advocating sounds an awful lot like Scientology. And yes, they do have "studies" that "prove" that their "evaluations" are accurate.
...I have a bit of a perspective into both worlds. My industrial psych class in college was the first time I was exposed to personality tests, specifically the Myers-Briggs. I love them, and still do. They can help you understand yourself and get some insight into the possible motivations of others. (Not a surprising statement, coming from an INFP. :P )
That being said, they should not be used in the hiring process. I think they're useful in the workplace as a way for team members to understand each other and try to see things from others' perspective. (Why does Bob freak out when I move things on his desk? Oh yeah, he's a Judgmental. Why doesn't Frank make decisions until the last possible moment? Ya, he's a Perceptive.)
And before you perceptives have a hissy fit, those are just general tendencies, not permanent categories you're pigeon holed in. And don't you judgmental go pigeon holing. And ain't you thinkers just clever for seeing the self referential contradiction there. ;)
Managers shouldn't use these personality tests to form teams. Personality is just too complex to manipulate like that, especially in groups. But they can be used by the individual members to help them interact better with their team mates.
as other people have mentioned here, who wants to work for those kinds of companies?
Let me tell you what my policy about employers is (I have made but one exception since I formulated this policy, and I had good reasons for that exception):
If they want me to take a test, they can take one first and show me their results. I don't care whether it is a personality test, or a polygraph test, or a drug test.
If upper managers have personality or gambling or theft or drug problems, THEY are a lot more likely to screw up the company than I am!!!
I actually asked once if a manager would take the same drug test they wanted me to take, and show me the results. They looked at me like I was crazy. I tossed down my application, walked out the door, and never looked back.
They can lead by example, or STFU.
I use a two-part personality test in interviews:
Part 1: I decide if I think you're an asshole. If I think so, you won't pass the interview, no matter how great your technical chops are.
Part 2: I decided if I like you. If I do, you may advance to the shortlist, if you meet the other requirements of the job. If I don't, you probably won't make the short list, but you won't be immediately washed out the way you would be if you failed Part 1.
While I'm being funny-but-serious here, personality fit is so important to building a good team that I do seriously recommend this short but simple test.
And the reason for that is that it is possible to have a wrong answer on an IQ test.
But with a "personality test" I keep hearing that there are no wrong answers (except that if you don't answer in a specific pattern then you won't be hired). That is stupid. You cannot judge how someone will act based upon how they CLAIM they will act or what they CLAIM that they believe.
And don't get me started on the FUCKING STUPID questions in the first place.
http://www.hartmaninstitute.org/html/HartmanValueProfile.html
36 stupid questions that will tell you everything you need to know about your value system. Yeah. Right. And yet you'll find all kinds of companies that will help you use it to "evaluate" applicants.
IANAL
As long as it does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, national origin, etc then it is probably legal to use it to sort applicants.
"Non-discriminatory" is NOT the same as "accurate".
I applied for a job in a large chain store a few years ago and got a question almost exactly like the last one, it was something a long the lines of "Do workers and management have the same interests at heart?" Woe to the blue collar wage worker who has read the first page of the Communist Manifesto, which says "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."
These types of tests have been used ever since professional management was invented as a skill separate from actually being able to do anything economically useful.
I suggest that anyone who has to work in an organization that uses these types of tests read "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte. Some key chapters are online here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-main.html However, what is not online is the Appendix, titled "How To Cheat on Personality Tests". The book was published in 1956.
Whyte doesn't suggest that you cheat on personality tests just because you are greedy, or because corporations are evil and you have to survive, or anything radical like that. It is clear from the book that Whyte is the kind of guy who presumes that most people are well-intentioned, that managers probably want to hire the best, and they need these scores to cover their ass, so people should give the correct answers on tests so managers can then pick the good guys and promote them.
Meyer-Briggs and Minnesota Multi-Phasic whatchamacallits have never been shown to be of any practical use, and their pointlessness has been known for decades.
"The Organization Man" is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but I think it is only funny if you have been exposed to Organization Men enough to recogize the traits he points out, and it is a kind of dry, no-punch line humour that I associate with old men who are constantly laughing at you inside. For the enjoyment of Slashdot I will reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from the "How to Cheat on Personality Tests" chapter:
"The important thing to realize is that you don't win a good score: you avoid a bad one. (...) Sometimes it is perfectly all right for you to score in the 80th or 90th percentile; if you are being tested, for example, to see if you would make a good chemist, a score indicating that you are likely to be more reflective than ninety out of a hundred adults might not harm you and might even do you some good."
"By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score somewhere between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked for word associations or comments about the world, give the most convential, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself:
a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more
b) I like things pretty well the way they are
c) I never worry much about anything
d) I don't care for books or music much
e) I love my wife and children
f) I don't let them get in the way of company work"
You know what is the saddest about these personality tests ? This guide to cheating on them was written just a few years after the basic ones became popular (they were developed in the 20's and 30's, came into use and were standardized (and also statistically tested and proven worthless) in the bureaucracy of WWII, and The Organization Man was published in '56), but the cheat guide works perfectly well even for tests developed long after the cheat guide was written.
You can take a computer administered test developed in the last few years by the best minds in modern management theory, and cheat it with a guide written over 50 years ago.
How about interviewing candidates normally, THEN put those who are in sensitive positions through a psych eval by an actual person rather than some automated testing service?
I suggest watching the second episode of ghost in the shell, second gig.
The entire exercise was a psych eval of someone who represented considerable danger.
The ultimate conclusion:
certain nuances in his psyche mean he will never act upon his violent fantasies.
Subjecting people to automated tests as a qualify/disqualify factor BEFORE examining their resume and interviewing them smacks of minority report and only serves to kill off the "eccentric geniuses" who have the greatest potential to bring ground breaking ideas to your organization.
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of my application, years ago, for a tech position with Gateway. I was told that their contracted "employment firm" would be getting in touch with me.
Their guy, who presented himself as a lead tech (and he might have been) called and said we would set up a telephone interview (he was many states away). I told him that was fine, but that if he was going to call me on that day, it was important that we keep to the schedule because I had an existing job, and my schedule was tight.
He called an hour late. Then, I was about halfway through the phone interview, when he interrupted me in the answer I was giving, spoke to someone where he was, then got back on the phone and said we would have to do this later, they had an "emergency" of some kind with a computer for a customer that had to be handled right away.
They were trying to stress-test me!
I explained to him, still calm and collected, that he could call me back on X day (the next day I think), but if he did he would have to be prompt that time, because I was busy at my job and did not have time to wait for him to call if he did not call on schedule.
He called an hour late again. I explained to him, as calmly and coolly as I could, that I really did want the job, but that I did not have time to talk to him. I explained that I had already told him once that I already had a good job, and was not willing to jeopardize that just so he could play transparent games in my "interview".
He turned completely cold. His voice turned cold, his responses turned cold, and he grudgingly said that they would get back to me.
Yeah, right.
Bell curves are perfect for displaying multiple, unrelated, items.
Roll a 6 sided die 100 times. You will NOT get a bell curve.
Roll 10 of them 100 times and you WILL get a bell curve.
Now, take a math test from 5th grade. Give it to some math majors in college. By the "personality test" logic, you'd still see a bell curve. But you wouldn't.
We went through that before in various psychology classes. Just because your "test" results show a regular bell curve does NOT mean that your test is accurate. In fact, it usually means the exact opposite.
They're one of the most annoying things a job applicant has to go through IMO, and only serve to weed out the honest individuals, as stated in TFA. I was surprised to read that there were keys to these things, because most of the answers are common sense. I for one take my time through them and at least make an attempt to answer honestly. I know the kind of person I am, and if I can't pass it honestly, then either the company is looking for the wrong kind of people, or they're deliberately looking for cheaters, in either case I would have no inclination to work for or have any further business with said company. I figure they'll get exactly what they bargained for in the end.
re Radio Shack: Don't overestimate the intelligence of the public. Nothing against Radio Shack in particular, but there really are people out there, apparently functional and sane, who will answer "yes, you should swear at customers" and then explain when and why. Likewise when it's justified to slip boxes of stuff out the back door of your employer. And if you hire one anyways, you get really nervous when they suddenly can't stop mentioning that they've seen "Faces of Death" eighty-six times.
And what you're supposed to do with the tortoise is to turn it over, then ride it out of the desert. That shows your intrinsic compassion, your creativity, and your sharp sense of business.
Personality tests, handwritting analysis, and all the other voodoo some companies ARE useful tests.
They are a very good measure of how gullible and naive the management of these companies are. Thats useful information in an interview, it tells you how fast you should walk out the door.
easy go. Welcome to the new world economy.
Quack, quack.
I think you just flunked out of one their tests, thanks for playing.
Quack, quack.
In one of the 400-level management classes I took in college, the instructor explained how he had created a test that evaluated for homosexuality, not by the answered themselves, but by the pattern that the location of the answers made on the score sheet. Seemed plausible the way he described it, but whether, or not, the test really could identify gender preference, the testers believed that it could.
His recommendation, "NEVER take such a test", unless preformed by your own shrink, and the scores shared only with you.
The tests are junk science, believed by power-mad paranoid schizophrenics, and you do NOT want to work for them anyway, unless you'll really fit into such a group.
Tests are good for the company because they weed out the assholes, the outspoken, and anyone who would dare protest. In short, anyone who's not a shearable, obedient sheep.
They are bad for the company because they repel honest folk, and attract the weak, or the shrewd and dishonest.
because the test-makers are acknowledging that people who cheat on their tests are more productive in the workplace!
So, spend fewer dollars on the hiring process, and get less productive workers!
The whole thing is nothing but a cluster-fuck, which was my whole point in the beginning.
I own a small IT firm and in the past 10 years I have hired perhaps 40 people and interviewed hundreds. I try hard to be a good guy and part of that is hiring people who will be a good fit for our firm. Making bad hiring decisions is very painful - for me, for the other people who work here, for our customers and for the employee who is more than likely not enjoying himself. And you know, in our type of consulting, where everyone knows lots of passwords to lots of firms, you can lose some sleep over wanting to let go someone who might have bad feelings over the matter. Its important to get the decision to hire right in the first place for everyone concerned.
I have some pretty smart and experienced guys as coaches, guys who have built and run businesses with hundreds of employees - whose counsel I respect. And one day when I had had a particularly painful experience with someone who was not working out, I asked one of these guys "what did you learn in your 40 years about hiring". And they pointed me to one of these firms. And you know, believe it or not, the good firms out there(we use Caliper) can pretty much do what they say. While its by no means the only criteria, our experience has shown that the insight from these profiles can provide useful input to the hiring decision. I should add that I am a research engineer by training - and so I had historically approached these things from a perspective of extreme skepticism. Further, I would not stand up and count myself as a very good reader of other people - I mean after all, there's a reason I'm an engineer instead of a social worker or psychologist.
Before I started using this for hiring I paid to have three people already on staff fill out a profile. I knew these guys, we had worked together for at least a year. I was astonished by the detail with with the person interpreting the test could describe the personalities of our folks. Things like "Joe is a pretty smart guy but he tends not to over exert himself, and yet no-one ever gets mad at him because he is so charming.". Maybe you had to be there and maybe you need to know Joe but the description was spot on. And time has just proven this was not a fluke.
Our folks are all consultants, they have to be good problems solvers and good "people" people. Based on our experience, we have found that these tests can be helpful in understanding
These tests can help tell you if you are inclined to be a good sales person vs a good engineer for example.
And its not mumbo jumbo that drives this. Its just freaking statistics. You do a lot of research characterizing lots of people and then you find a set of questions whose answers correlate the characteristics you have observed.
Having added this testing to our interview process, we have dropped our bad hiring decisions from 30% to less than 10%. Personally, again, I think its a courtesy to all concerned to do eve
Out of the hundred or so participants, I was the only person with my personality type. The event coordinator -- an HR manager who had never before met me -- made me stand below a sign bearing my 4-letter code, and explained to everyone there what I was capable and incapable of doing, both in the industry and in my personal life.
It's pop psychology at its worst.
about moving from Radio Shack to Godaddy but I'm pretty sure we still have some accounts there. ;-)
Either way I'm inclined to believe that the real secret to hiring good people is having skilled and intelligent people to do it, which of course isn't practical so we use tests because we don't know that it says more about us then anything. Maybe sell them in a big yellow book that just says: HIRING FOR DUMMIES.
Quack, quack.
So they HIRED the cheaters? Why? Aren't those tests supposed to weed out the cheaters?
What
the
FUCK?!?
So people who CLAIM to be different then they are ... are actually the way they CLAIMED to be ... and NOT the way that they are?
No. From the claims you've made, it is more likely that they cannot tell "real" responses from "fake" responses ... and they have no idea what those responses (real OR fake) say about a person's suitability for a job.
When the guy how LIES on his evaluation
to get "graded" as type X
does as good or BETTER
than someone who answered honestly
and was "correctly" "graded" as type X.
I always hired who ever I thought looked best in a tight sweater - without regard to race, creed, or color.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Right. The tests reward who is winning in the real world. So these are good tests.
Check this out.
God knows what the answers are! There were grammatical errors on my test so I am not sure how much the answers really matter. The results of my assessment said I wasn't qualified for a job I had been doing for 10 years. No explanation was offered, just a "not recommended" result. I'd like to know why a company put that kind of authority in the hands of another company, and how such a conclusion could be drawn from a 100-question test.
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I'm a pessimist and an introvert. This does NOT interfere with my ability to put on a professional face and be friendly to clients,
The real pessimist's version
....
I'm a pessimist and an introvert. This will probably interfere with my ability to put on a professional face and be friendly to those intimidating clients, meaning I'll lose my job, my house and then probably be mistaken for a terrorist and sent to Gitmo. I can then immagine a huge Hurricane
personality type. Well not quite true, precisely the same test filled in honestly might - but you'd have to be a dribbling idiot to fill one in honestly for a job interview.
Not just a single way of filling it in, answers would depend on the job type you are applying for - I would be more subservient and blindly optimistic in a retail job, whereas for a higher skilled job you add in a bit more personality.
I think these tests do work - just not in the way they're officially meant to.
If they just changed the title of the test to "What sort of person do you think we're looking for?" then it becomes a nice intellectual exercise. The customer who's going to walk into the sneaker shop is going to be greated with a smile despite the hangover, on the form the manager will be declared to be your new god, despite the fact the guy manages a sneaker shop. Just an extension of the interview process we've had for years - just instead of lying to the interviewer (about how is is the job you've always wanted - not that you've got a mortgage payment due, they were employing locally and hey you only intend to do it for a few months). On the other side of the table you know pretty much everything out of their mouths is 'interview-bollocks' - but it's just a game you play, points are awarded to each side and if they score enough they win and get the job. Actually most interviews are just a matter of avoiding saying anything stupid. They have your CV and know what you can do already, interview is just to check you can lie convincingly to function in a large group.
Fuck it, and fuck them. This sort of thing leads direct to "Idiocracy" becoming reality. So this bit is borrowed from Melbel, who posted it in the hopes that the information gets spread far and wide. If you are looking for a job that uses this exam, I'm sorry for you, but here's at least a glimpse into how the faragin bastidges want you to conform:
SA = Strongly Agree
A = Agree
D = Disagree
SD = Strongly Disagree
You expect to succeed in whatever you do SA
You are good at taking charge of a group A
You keep calm when under stress SA
You are somewhat of a thrill-seeker SD
You like to be alone SD
You are well aware of your inner feelings SA
People are often mean to you SD
You get angry more often than nervous SD
You know when someone is in a bad mood, even if they donâ(TM)t show it SA
You would like a job that is quiet and predictable SD
You work hard at what you do SA
You keep your promises, no matter what SA
You work better with your hands than your mind A
You donâ(TM)t work too hard because it doesnâ(TM)t pay off anyway SD
You love to be with people SA
You love to listen to people talk about themselves SA
You hate to give up if you canâ(TM)t solve a hard problem SA
You prefer to do things alone SD
When under pressure, you think about all that can go wrong SD
It is easy for you to ignore small problems SD
You feel lively and energetic at parties SA
You are a quiet person SD
You donâ(TM)t like to be interrupted when you are doing something SD
When someone is rude to you, you get over it quickly SA
You do not always feel hopeful about your future SD
When you need to, you take it easy at work SD
You attract attention to yourself SD
You believe that you would be very successful at a sales job SA
You finish the work you have to do, even when youâ(TM)re tired or bored SA
You are proud of the work you do at school or on a job SA
You look forward to going to work (or school) SA
You quickly see the solutions to new problems SA
You have no big regrets about your past SA
In school, you were one of the best students SA
It bothers you when something unexpected disrupts your day SD
When someone treats you badly, you ignore it SA
You like people to notice you A
Slow-moving people make you impatient A
You often feel nervous about something SD
You got mostly good grades in high school SA
Many people cannot be trusted D
You rarely act without thinking SA
You have friends, but donâ(TM)t like them to be too close SD
You could describe yourself as âtidyâ(TM) SA
In your free time, you go out more than stay home SA
Your stuff is often kind of messy SD
People have a lot of arguments with you SD
You have a lot of different abilities SA
Your moods are steady from day to day SA
You are lively and talkative SA
There are some people you really canâ(TM)t stand SD
You do not fake being polite SD
You show it when you are in a bad mood SD
When things go wrong, itâ(TM)s hard to control your temper SD
It bothers you when you have to obey a lot of rules SD
You can argue hard but still keep it friendly SA
You would rather not get involved in other peopleâ(TM)s problems D
It is not easy for you to put your ideas in writing SD
When you are annoyed with something, you say so SD
You were absent very few days from high school SA
Youâ(TM)ve had some disappointments that youâ(TM)ll never get over SD
You follow through on everything that you start SA
You feel nervous when there are demands you canâ(TM)t meet A
You think a lot about the worries and stresses you have D
Peopleâ(TM)s feelings are sometimes hurt by what you say SD
You make more sensible choices than careless ones SA
It bothers you a long time when someone is unfair to you SD
You change from feeling happy to sad without any reason SD
You like to try things that are new and different SA
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I applied for a job with Oracle in the UK after University - over 6 years ago now. The first thing I came up against was this online personality test.
I decided to be honest with the answers. Evidently not the right decision as I failed the test and they were not interested in talking to me (despite at that time being almost guaranteed a 1st class degree in CS from a top university).
Q: "You have to give up on some things that you start."
A: "Strongly disagree."
This was one of the questions in the Oracle test - I put strongly agree. Occasionally new information appears after you've begun something, and possibly tells you that you're heading down the wrong path. You learn from this and start again.
Honesty is a function of morality, which is not a function of personality.
Personality tends to discuss things like Introversion / Extroversion, thinking / intuitive, etc.
Morality, on the other hand, tends to disuss things like honesty.
I encountered a personality test in applying for an operator apprenticeship at the local refinery a while back. I'm not sure if the personality test was the reason, but I was not called back for an interview. The job requirements were fairly basic, entry-level.
Needless to say, my great-grandfather was the plant manager at this particular plant. My father and grandfather are/were managers for companies that build some of the equipment used there. And now, I write the operations manuals that I would have been following had I gotten the position.
So, basically, personality tests are a horrible way to hire people.
This test may not accurately screen out people with certain particular personality traits, but it does select favourably for people with the intelligence to second-guess the answers required, or find them on the internet. That alone will cut staff turnover very effectively, at least for the sort of jobs described in the linked article, and unlike an IQ test, it covers intelligence, intuition, and initiative.
I was asked to take a personality test at the company I work for and my response was "Why would you want to open yourselves up for possible civil litigation for thinly veiled religious, ethnic, or racial discrimination? Has the Legal department looked at these tests yet?". Test was canceled.
Here in Australia, if you want to study Medicine at University, you are required to take and pass the UMAT test.
This test is no joke, I know a couple of people who got good enough marks for entry to Medicine, then failed UMAT and had to wait a year to try it again (passing the second time around). It seems useless to me - why reject someone only to accept them a year later.. had their personality changed that much in 12 months?
Ever heard about the "baum test"? You are asked to draw a tree. How many of you IT guys thought you would draw a red-black tree? An AVL, perhaps? Well, I did (think, not draw - I've thankfully never been subject to such a test).
Some years ago I was a candidate for a team leader / chief technical advisor position for a development project overseas. Part of the process was a couple hours of psychological testing by a psychologist who had just finished his studies in the US and was suffering from jet lag having just returned to his home country. We did a bit of psychiatric testing-related stuff, then we waundered off into computers and the technical problems he was experiencing - we probably spent 2/3rds of the time talking computers. I got the job by the way.
All the jobs I applied to in Norway (IT, development) had a personality test as part of the interview process.
Je ne parle pas francais.
2^10-- you can't do a kilo of basic math?
I admit I'd groan.. but it wouldn't wipe me..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
As a new IT graduate I went for a trainee IT manager position working for a large UK recruitment company. I travelled three hours to the interview, which solely consisted of a reading comprehension and basic maths test. I sat through it but vowed to never work for or use that organisation.
These days I have 12+ years experience as an IT contractor, and if I were ever subjected to personality testing or other mindless interview techniques I would just terminate the interview and leave. I don't want to work for an organisation that treats me like a piece of meat, even if I am a contractor.
I remember as a teenager taking an aptitude test, which is basically a personality test. It scored me as being suited to every single category accept for forestry / outdoors work. I had just spent the last two summers as a backwoods guide in a remote area.
15 years of study in philosophy of mind and other behavioral sciences later, I have come to the conclusion there is ZERO grounding in real science for the definitive conclusions they are suppose to indicate.
Living in Chile
I work for a fortune-500 concrete company. I have a coworker who had worked in Accounting/Management with just a high-school education. He applied for a job here, and got one in the QC department. They took him over to the cylinder break machine, showed him how it worked, and asked him to start doing break tests.
He said "no."
They said, "I'm sorry, is there a problem?"
He said "there are thinkers, and there are drones. You want me to be a drone. I'm a thinker."
So they said, "just a second", and immediately moved him to management.
Say what?
It was entirely based on that personality test of refusing to work that they moved him to management -- that, combined with his basic acknowledgement of a 2-class system, and his claim that he was in the upper class.
I'm going to point this out: from what I have seen, this story is typical of economies worldwide.
World Stock Markets, FALL! FALL FAR! KEEP GOING! GO AWAY!
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Even the ones with your shrink suck. I took one that made it sound like I was bi-polar. Asked if anyone said I talked too fast. Of course; I just moved from NYC to the Midwest. EVERYONE thought I talked too fast. And if you've ever been down or blue? DEPRESSION. Even if you had good reasons, like a divorce, or death, or something similar. I walked away from that shrink and never looked back. Being from NYC makes you manic, and miscarrying makes you depressive.
+1
Yeah, that was a blast.
I was a bit too honest on the first test:
"If you finish a project early, what would you be most likely to do?"
A: Help a colleague
B: Relax
C: Ask for a new assignment
Well, I answered the "true" answer, rather than the "correct" answer. There were a lot of questions like that on the test. I failed.
I came back in a few weeks later to take the test again, picked "correct" answers, and made it to an interview. Of course, then the economy took a nose-dive and they canceled that position opening, but it was a learning experience.
Companies would rather have people who lie about wanting to stay late and be a "team player" rather than people who are honest and don't.
I once took a personality test that was based on 8 or 9 people sitting in a room, and asked to roleplay a situation (planning for some sort of bogus project) in front of an HR woman who watched us.
My overall impression was that, although the whole exercise was rather silly, the HR woman was pretty smart and knew what she was doing. While I wouldn't use such a technique to select someone to hire, I might use it to discard those one or two people who have serious problems working in a group, or too little imagination or D&D experience to figure out what is going on....
Unfortunately, I was told by some colleagues that at the time HR was being used to find excuses to not hire people who had done well on technical interviews or internships, to enforce an unofficial "we're not hiring now" policy.
As far as I understand personality tests, they indicate tendencies. For example some people may be more prone to plan ahead and others more spur of the moment. The tests do define these quite well, however what they do not measure is the coping mechanisms people have developed to overcome situations which do not match there personality types. For example many people such comedians which you would consider extravert's are actually deeply shy, but have managed to generate an external face to overcome there shyness. I would be deeply sceptical of deciding on someone job suitability just on the basis of such a test.
Also it wasn't long ago that handwriting analysis was a common method used to filter applicants, despite it having the same scientific value as astrology.
At the end of the day they are all mechanisms for passing the buck for hiring people.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
There is no better way to avoid the personality test than not being in employment, ie to run your own business. There is no reason why a programmer should become an employee, since the production technology for software is well-distributed amongst the populace. If you already own a computer and you know how to program it, then you can become an entrepreneur immediately. I can understand why one would prefer to be an employee if their expertise was in nuclear reactors, considering that in our era nuclear reactors are more likely to be found in large organisations rather than in homes, but for programmers who already own personal computers there is no good reason not to be self-employed.
On the question: "You see that one of your coworkers occasionally shoplifts small items. Do you:"
_Always_ answer: "It's no big thing. He's a good worker otherwise."
1. If you _are_ company rat material, do you really want to come to that self-realization when your tires are slashed?
2. Why are you applying for a job at the Buy More anyway?
[Actually, as a kid I was pretty naive to interview strategies. But, then, the best job I ever had the group interview somehow got around to the fact I was from Minnesota and so was Bob Dylan. So, quite the opposite of rapport, if you show up at a place that is treating you like a child, shouldn't you turn around and run very fast?]
You have to take a personality test to be hired by Proctor and Gamble. When I was a temp there I applied. Since the people I worked under wanted me hired, they offered to give me an answer key. I refused, and apparently did not answer correctly.
Oooooh, this one really hits home for me. I worked for a nation-wide shoe retailer for a few years, in a management position no less. I would like to think that I was a stand-out employee and an effective manager, despite my youth and lack of management experience -- though I had worked in a supervisory position for four years before this job. I worked for the company on-and-off for a couple of years after my original departure for higher education. I wound up failing the personality test required for employment, thankfully implemented well after my hire.
Of course, I feel this is because I am not doe-eyed, rose-colored about things. While I know that even model employees have thoughts about stealing, or some thoughts about crime, I also know that only dishonest employees will commit a crime against an employer. I also think too technically about the idea of theft and what it means to break the rules. I accept that I over-thought my answers, but I tend to think the issue is that of lack of naivete rather than being disloyal or dishonest.
Originally, you had to pass the test using some unknown criteria, for which the program would report "DO" or "DO NOT" call this person for an interview. Later iterations gave more detailed information, such as strengths and weaknesses in certain areas like loyalty, trustworthiness, etc., and recommended whether or not to call this person back for an interview.
The sad part was that many exemplary employees were labeled as problem candidates, and on more than one occasion someone who turned into a problem passed with flying colors.
Personally, I despise automated interview processes, especially on-line applications with so-called "qualifier questions" which are really "DISqualifiers." (State of Florida, I am looking SQUARELY at you!) While not perfect, nothing beats an old-fashioned face-to-face interview for getting a real feel of a candidate's potential.
hehehe, also interesting is the quote for this page load: "Captain Penny's Law: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you Can't Fool Mom."
Had these test for tech jobs. Once spent 8 hours at an interview, free lunch provided and I was desperate for work.
You walk into a room and notice three beautiful paintings and one bad one, from the three answers, what best sums up your mood.
You made cakes for your co-workers, but there is one short, who would you decline and why?
Descibe your personality in terms of a sandwich or cookie?!?!
The only thing these do is sort the day-dreamers from the hard-working geeks who spent years learning their craft properly and will be turned down for a job 'cos they can't tell the difference between what a girrafe and monkey may think of a box, with holes, containing a lump of carrot cake!!!!
Before being aquired by Citigroup, ATD used them as part of a psychological evaluation. As part of the evaluation, there was also testing with an industrial psychologist. They developed a personality profile, which looked for personality traits based on the type of position you were applying for (programmer, trader, engineer, IT, etc.). This was used in conjunction with a full set of interviews with the team and management and credit check. After being hired, I got to speak with psychologist. Everything being said, it was a pretty dead-on evaluation. I did have to stop wearing my foil hat to work.
When I was at Hewlett Packard, I took a project management fundamentals course, and we mentioned the Kiersey/whatever (i forget) type personality test as a way for management to get to know the sorts of people on the team. There was a lot of talk about how to use the 'strengths' of this or that personality. IMO, all it really served to do was to point out the obvious... that so and so was different from so and so, and that we're all somewhat odd... I think it is highly unlikely that such tests provide a huge amount of insight into predictive success of a project--outside of what is more often than not already obvious if you just get to know the people in your team. Just host a stupid barbeque. You'll probably learn more there... As for hiring, that's why they always take the potential candidate out for lunch, right? --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I think you scored too high on the Praxis tests. Schools would only want someone like you to teach gifted kids. I taught high school math for two years; before that experience I thought that only the "brightest" should teach. After teaching, I realized that you only need a couple of really bright teachers in each area, because 99% of the students aren't that bright. I really really struggled with teaching. There were behavior problems. The school had an average of 3 students die each year. (The student census was under 1000.)
Teachers are 90% baby sitters. The best teachers are normally the ones that had to work hard to learn their trade; they can best relate with students.
After my two years teaching, I returned to engineering. The stress is much lower.
These conclusions are pretty much akin to astrology, but because you have invested time and money into them then now you have an emotional attachment to this dreadful procedures that don't allow you to see them for what they are: a big scam.
Take the results for any of your employees, apply them to anybody else. How accurate they are? You will be surprised to find that any conclusions describe pretty "accurately" most of the people most of the time. Same technique used by astrologers and other snake oil pedlars.
Look at economists, they have been trying to do exactly the same and they have failed, miserably, as recent events probe. Trying to define people behaviour by statistics is not a rational thing to try to do.
The problem with these "tests" is that they forget that individuals are not passive subjects of study, but dynamic agents that can react to the very test that is been applied to them. Any test of this kind becomes obsolete pretty much as soon as somebody that understand what such a test is all about. The behaviour that is trying to be be observed changes at that very same moment, reason for which any results are completely and utterly pointless.
You success hiring people may have more to do to you playing close attention to the skills of the people and to real, personal interaction during interviews.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
While everyone is piling on about how pointless personality tests are, I figured I'd mention a related test - drug tests.
Seems like all the big corps and too many of the smaller corps are now requiring "pre-employment drug-screening" for jobs in the mail room all the way up to, but not including, the board room.
Most of these tests are pointless. Never mind the whole "guilty until proven innocent" thing (what if there was a piss test for speeding or whoring or grand theft, would all the sheep take it too?). Instead, just think about the economics. Lets say you are a habitual drug user and that the job you are applying for is at least $30K/yr. Lets say that you really need the job and are prepared to do what it takes to get it. $3,000, just 10% of that yearly salary, is going to be more than enough to pay for a fake-id and some guy who is clean to go in and take the drug test for you. Maybe you have to get the money from a loan shark, but chances are that loan shark can also set you up with the guy who makes fake-ids and the guy who will pee in your place.
So, for even a fairly low paying job, there is enough financial incentive to completely circumvent the job. Factor in what most engineering and software development jobs pay and the reasons just get even stronger.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I worked retail for 3 years at a small chain electronics store (had 14 outlets). I went in for my interview (went fine) did the personality test (it said to not hire me). The manager hired me and ignored the test. The result? Out of 300+ sales associates chainwide I was in the top 5 90% + of the time. I had a good work history there, left on good terms and helped a lot of people with making the right purchase.
I worked for a firm in the past that published and administered a well-known psychometric test, used as part of hiring processes world-wide. Advice from one of the psychologists was never to use the results of the test as filtering criteria - you're on legally dodgy ground if you do and might get sued. They should only ever be used as input into the interview itself - to indicate lines of questioning that should be followed. The are simply not good enough predictors of workplace behaviour to be relied upon.
I've taken very similar tests on sites which give ME the results and it shows that, while I possess many good qualities, my reserved nature makes me hard for others to read, particularly in that my expression of happiness or enthusiasm are externally muted.
I'm the same way, and, despite my excellent GPA and decent experience upon graduation from college, I was unable to get a job for a long time. I had no end of interviews, but no follow-ups.
I eventually went to an interview coach, who suggested that I explain to people exactly what you just said. So at my next interview, I ended each of the individual interviews with a brief statement along the lines of "I may not seem like I'm excited about this job, but that's just because of how I am. Etc."
It was hard for me to do, and some people seemed shocked to hear me talk about myself in such an open way, but they all seemed to appreciate it. And a bunch of the interviewers empathized and said they had the same problem. It worked out well, and I'd recommend it to other introverts out there.
"Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life" [vhemt.org]
I am an auto insurance claims adjuster with several years of experience - plus I enjoy the work. A few years ago I tried to apply at Progressive, and the first thing they did was give me a personality test. Apparently, I failed, because they read me a statement telling me to GTFO their office. They didn't care about my experience, didn't test my knowledge, nothing.
So later, when I applied at Geico, they pulled the same thing. So I just lied my ass off, and they made me a job offer. Which I refused, because they wanted to pay me $36,000 to work in Honolulu (which would be the equivalent of making $20,000 or less back home).
Resumes and assessments are both forms of data gathering used to create evidence of job-fit and support the hiring decision. Companies ask for resumes everyday and screen them, knocking people out of the running for a job A very subjective, bias loaded process, yet very few people complain. Your resume failed the test. The way you chose to describe yourself failed to be job relevant. A company asks every candidate the same questions (fair, consistent, objective) in the form of a test or profile, and people freak out. Your self description, based upon your choices from standardized language or your ability to respond correctly to questions addressing technical capabilities (thinking, interpretation, computation, diagnosis, etc.) was more job relevant or less job relevant than others As in any discipline, variation in approach (poor to best-in-class) exists. Some IT professionals rely heavily on off-the-shelf building blocks for client solutions. Others prefer to create custom code and a needs-based solution. In the world of assessments, there are many off-the-shelf tests, profiles, and evaluation tools. Some work better than others. Some are interesting, but of no value for improving the quality of hire. Many are easy to implement without proper training, nor research on how to interpret the results. Those are the types of assessments candidate often react most negatively too The leading-edge solutions for talent evaluation are job-specific, simulated work samples. This allows the candidate to take parts of the job for a test drive which produces a work sample. In the design-build stage, research is conducted to document how candidate response patterns predict on-the-job performance. Once such solution is the Virtual Job Tryout® Candidates enjoy it because it uses web 2.0 principles, is very job relevant, multi-media, informative, and challenging. Recruiters discover great value in comparing and contrasting candidates based upon objective criteria. Companies embrace it because the return on investment is established from improved performance of new hires and there is minimal risk for adverse reactions from candidate. Just as in IT solutions, candidate evaluation methods designed to unique performance specifications often produce the best results. Joseph P. Murphy Shaker Consulting Group, Inc. Developers of the Virtual Job Tryout® Joe.murphy@shakercg.com http://www.shakercg.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNTJGkSV830&feature=channel_page
... about time to get my sweater out of the closet and try it on again. Hope I can tug it down over my slightly larger stomach... been a few years.
It is a special sweater though. It says, "Intellectual Incognito". My grandmother gave it to me.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
When I was hired as part of a large expansion of a rapidly-growing group, we went through much of the typical corporate team-building stuff to get to know each other quickly, but we were also given personality tests, and we discussed the results and how they would affect our roles in the group. It didn't tell us anything we wouldn't have learned about each other in the first few months, but it certainly made that process much easier.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
the stupidity of using your FICO score to determine if you get the job.
... not the answers.
For my current job (data manager/protocol design for a research program), the interview had 3 parts. First I met the primary investigator, then I met the team and lastly I was brought into a room, given a stack of personality tests and told simply, "I'll be back in an hour."
The tests were all of the kind people are mentioning here - either ones that were designed as surveys to try and get a snapshot of a larger population (so 1 individual's results were meaningless) or ones with questions that were overly broad ("Have you ever done anything really bad?"), absurd ("You just bought groceries and are 15 miles away from the grocery store when you realize the clerk gave you $1 too much change. Do you: a) go back to the store, b) steal the $1"), pointless ("What kind of animal would you be if you could be anything?"), offered to many response options ("All the time, almost all the time, most of the time, a little more than half the time, not sure but just barely over half the time, half the time, not sure but just barely less than half the time..." etc) and so on.
Rather than take them, I just started critiquing them - "What's this item intended to measure?" "This is too vague, terms need to be defined." "Reduce the number of options to 5, an optimal number to both capture variety and remove option paralysis." and suggesting alternative measures that are more appropriate for what it seems like they were trying to get at.
An hour goes by, I'm merrily marking these things up, the primary comes in and sees what I've done and offers me the job, because what I did in the interview is what the job would entail, and the personality qualities they were looking for were more along the lines of "will find a polite way of saying 'what you're doing is stupid, here's a better way to go about doing that.'"
Best job I ever had, too - I've got lots and lots of leeway to change things that I don't feel are being effective, but also working with a really great team who have been able to teach me a lot of stuff about my new field so I'm able to grow quite a bit. The money is shit (that's academia) but money isn't everything, and I do get 3 months vacation :)
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Its funny this should just now come out.. this has been going on for at least 20 years. If you have ever applied at a convent store, or other places, including IT where you have a multi page questionere that asks such things as "if you were in this situation, would you report this, if you saw someone steal would you do this.. etc.." it is an adaptive form of the MMPI used to assess personality.
Many times the same question is repeated 3-4 times but worded different to see if you will answer differently for the same concept.
We piss test, background check, and fret over credit scores......all are currently legal -and shouldn't be in many cases. To the misinformed; personality trait tests remain highly valid, regardless as to claims against them. No, they haven't ever been 'debunked' or discredited, just misinterpreted or not understood well enough. MMPI etc are still useful and fairly accurate. What's most interesting is the highest-validity test ever devised, the simple standardized IQ test. Great metric for predicting everything from theft, absenteeism, to overall performance. Illegal since Gregg vs. Duke Power in the '70s.- dumbest precedence ever. I too aced Indust. Psych (and tutored Stats classes). Org. Dev. and HR people have enough of a grasp on stats to know what they can legally get away with. Personally I'd hire anyone with a high IQ and toss everything else ('preemployment screening', exp., etc). Stats back that up.
I'm pretty sure if you have a personality, you can't be hired to work in IT.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
I meant that number of basic math questions, not what 2^10 was. Smartass.
Seriously, if I had to sit in a room and answer 1024 basic math questions (like "what's the square root of 2?" "Uh, that's an irrational number"), for 4 hours, I'd be pretty batty by the time they asked me a question pertaining to the actual job.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
I was applying for a nice IT position and had to take one of these personality tests.
I didn't get the job because they said the test showed that I was an "asshat".
However due to the test results they did offer me a different job in upper management. Well, I think it is more likely it was the test results than the chair I threw at them.
-Steve B
I took such a test for a Vancouver software testing position in Vancouver in 1997.
I was flabbergasted when they described me to myself, it was dead on.
I was blasting through these questions, with no hesitation bullshit answers that I knew would please the interviewer until I hit this one. What does it say about my personality that it's only here that I start sweating bullets?
Will undoubtedly get lost in the myriad of other posts. I doubt my tiny voice will be heard. I am a DBA, and my take on personality tests, is they exist for the sole reason of giving the employer a reason to not hire you.
Rationale being, since the potential employee requires a valid reason for not being hired (for litigation purposes), the management staff needs a reason to not hire this person besides colour of skin, food in teeth, showing up late etc etc.
The personality test has nothing to do with the hiring of this person, its a trick to get around litigation.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
If someone wants you to take a personality test, ask for their credentials. Virtually no one who knows enough about such testing would use it for employment testing. If you ask, they won't hire you, and you should be glad. You should insist on that person's name anyway and turn it and the company into the APA.
The main finding of personality psychology is that there are 5 factors to personality. If the person giving the test can tell you what they are, which ones are relevant for the position, and if they'll notify you of your score compared to their hiring criteria, take it. Otherwise, run away. Sure they'll hire someone else. Let that poor bastard suffer under pseudo-scientific adminstraional amateurs. You'll be glad you didn't.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This type of testing is probably worthwhile for markets were dealing with the customer directly is vital for success. However, I think there's little to fear for those looking to work in the background with a strong portfolio backing them up.
Besides, who do you think is more likely to get laid off first in a corporate downsizing? The "people person"... aka the "middle man".
As long as you are personally vital to the success or failure of a project, your personality isn't really that important to the equation.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I recently had an on campus interview with Sikorsky. When I sat down, the interviewer told me that it was strictly a "behavioral interview." Thats what they call them now. "Behavioral Interviews"
I saw the list of students they interviewed and later the students they selected for second round... turns out they selected three huge pricks from a pool of about thirty honest kids.
The kids they selected lie through their teeth and cheat on a regular basis. It makes you wonder what type of employees a company like this is filled with if they are using awful "Behavioral Interviews" to select candidates.
I know very strong and effective managers who think personality tests can be useful.
For example, many of the best salespeople are very outgoing and social but at the same time don't care much what other people think of them (so they can take 30 rejections in a row without being discouraged). The is a pretty rare combination for obvious reasons. If a personality inventory shows that a candidate has these traits, that's viewed as interesting and potentially a point in favor of the candidate (not something to be applied rigidly or blindly but as useful information).
One other point is that the better modern personality inventories are usually pretty carefully designed to detect cheating with questions that the "honest" and "expected" answers are different, so they are much harder to game than many people are saying here.
My class took a test for our Real Estate licenses and we were all smart enough to give them the answers the test designers expected and all passed, but had we given the answers we wanted to, all sorts of good candidates would have been black-listed.
Here are some examples they didn't consider. These are paraphrased statements from conversations with classmates.
Q: Are you God fearing? (Correct answer: Yes)
A: Yes -- I am a thief, so I am afraid God is going get me for it eventually.
B: No -- A truly honest or innocent person has nothing to fear from God.
B: No -- Belief in God doesn't stop people from doing really horrible things in His name. What is wrong with doing right because it is Right?
Q: Are you honest?
A: Yes, of course I am. I only pirate software when I wouldn't have bought it, so the company who developed it isn't losing anything.
B: No. I answer "Fine" when someone asks "How are you?" even when I feel like crap, because I know it is an American greeting noise and they don't really want to know about my health.
Q: Are you good at math?
A: Yes. It only takes me half an hour to balance my checkbook.
B: No. I am struggling with spinor fields (a spinor of order 4s contains as much information as a tensor of order 2s) and though I can manipulate the formulae, I can't quite get my mind around them enough to understand their application to bosons.
There were many more questions, and most required yes or no answers that were superficial and pointless.
All that test really did was convince me that Real Estate Licensing was a crock that passed folks who dishonestly gave the expected answers (see other comments for more examples) and failed anyone who had the nerve or innocence to answer honestly.
I'm a psychologist, and I was always taught that tests are a component of an evaluation. They can be used as "short-cuts" to learning important things about someone, but cannot be the be-all, end-all. The psych should have taken those issues into context.
However, I would think whatever test you took would use more than one or two questions to determine bi-polar or depression...
Sounds like you have your priorities in order... ;-)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Many years ago (in the late 70's) I interviewed for a job as a line mechanic at a dealership in central Illinois where they had me take one of these "tests". Because I was honest, I failed... I determined to never again submit myself to that sort of degrading treatment. I have since become a software engineer and consultant of some reputation and have been privy to many trade and industrial secrets of my clients. NEVER would I consider doing anything to abridge the trust they have in me. Personally, I think these tests are a means of providing a rationale to HR personnel who are otherwise incapable of making decent judgment calls on their prospective hires.
I had to take a personality test several years ago and the HR manager showed me my results. After she read the results, I told her that they were interesting, but as valid as my horoscope. Its like a psychic - they'll say a lot of things, some things might even be true, but these things are true for everyone to some extent.
My interviewing policy is to hire people who I want to work with, their skills are secondary.
All interviews are personality tests. Whether written or not the questions are designed to determine how much the interviewer is likely to want to work with you. Even the technical questions are a landmine, if you know more than the interviewer you are at risk of not being hired because you threaten him/her.
You can't win, you can't even quit the game.
Why bother
Important questions are repeated with the question/answer slightly changed. If you're 'cheating' (aka lying) then it is likely you won't give consistent answers and it shows up as a giant red flag when the answers are being evaluated.
Or, if you have a view others think inconsistent. I have never been drunk. I have never consumed any drug illegally (including under-age drinking). I think that crack cocaine (and all other controlled substances) should be legal. They two times I was subjected to such a test, I think they thought I was either a stoner or a liar because I have a personal belief that is unusual. I'd never take drugs that will harm me or alter my mental state except to fix a medical problem (yes, that means that I didn't take any pain meds after knee surgery or a very painful crash). But I think they should be legal so anyone that wanted to could. And that leaves me unhireable for the crappy tests, because they'll usually peg me as a lying stoner.
Learn to love Alaska
I was once refused a job for lying on my resume. I had been a member of the IEEE for a great many years, but due to a name change (from marriage), the directory said otherwise. They assumed I was lying, rather than ask me about it.
I am sure the person they did hire had a seriously inflated resume, but because they were knowingly cheating, their lies were undetectable.
It is easier to buy a refrigerator than hire an employee, and much less costly, but I am sure there are plenty of folks who regret their choice after they actually try it out.
It does not matter how many criteria you apply, it is still just a best guess.
I actually ask this question in all interviews I conduct. The answer is not important so much as how the candidate justifies the answer. I'm just interested to hear that the candidate has a preference and stands behind it for a valid reason that can be articulated clearly.
The choice of editor, in my book, is an ergonomic decision. Certain people are more productive using emacs, some using vi, some using nedit, and some just using notepad, depending on the task at hand.
Are you saying that the combination of your mother's personality and yours did not net you a good enough result? Sounds like the test worked just fine in this instance, since it weeded out one person who would 'cheat'.
Two years ago I applied for a position as a junior DBA. The interview went really well. I had teh technical know-how and hit it off with the existing team members. In fact, a couple of them said, off the record, that they were confident I'd get the position and they were looking forward to working with me.
Then I took the personality test. Ten questions, multiple choice. I filled it out by coloring in the bubbles, like an old scantron test. At the end, the woman from HR drew a line connecting the dots. They made a check mark. She opened a book of graphs, compared mine to those in teh book and frowned. I was a check mark. They only wanted straight lines. It didn't matter where the line fell, they just wanted straight lines.
I didn't get the job, and to this day I curse check marks.
Yes, total honesty is a difficult policy, and inconvenient. Also, it takes mindful attention at all times.
I try not to lie by omission either, which does not endear me to those who lie "socially" all the time.
The most annoying circumstances are the meaningless questions that nevertheless require an answer.
Q: How are you today, Mx Smith?
A: Do you really want to know?
I remember taking one of these tests as a teenager for a job at 7/11 and I didn't get the job based on my answers, which were honest and truthful. This made me realize that it didn't pay to be honest when it comes to these things and I never failed another one. You just answer the way you think they want you to and remain consistent with those answers because later questions try to trip you up by asking the same thing in a different way. This was the beginning of my cynicism training and corporations have continued to enhance that training ever since. I'm so cynical now that I don't even believe in my cynicism.
I took a personality test and failed. :)
Consider this:
On January 21, 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added later while in custody, for a previous arrest in 1965, twenty years in total to be served consecutively for less than a half ounce of marijuana. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed many of the tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening.[14] As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary
I have lied in the past, but now I have a strict policy of honesty
You must not have a spouse.
Technically, that may make me dishonest, because I don't always share the truth
That's called lying by omission so you've now admitted that you actually do lie despite having lied when you said you didn't.
Lies aren't inherently evil or morally wrong. They often are but not always. As a simple example it's common for people in the US to greet each other with "how are you?" and we normally answer "good" or "fine" even if we aren't. That's potentially a lie but it doesn't matter because they weren't really asking how we were anyway. It's a social formality and we don't actually care about the answer. Lies happen all the time, sometimes for actually good purposes. Doctors are required to lie sometimes to protect patient confidentiality - and that is a Good Thing. (with apologies to Martha Stuart)
"Why not?"
Because one puppy > any amount of lusers. Simple, really.
Puppies will wag their tails and drool and be happy to see you.
Lusers jsut drool.
Myers-Briggs has been mentioned in the threads. When my new boss was hired the first thing she did to her management staff (myself and my spousal unit included) was force us to take the Meyers Briggs. She had memorized the thing and from then on went around saying stuff like, "well, you're an INTJ, therefore you would approach this issue in this way, blah, blah, blah for the next few years. I told her I thought it was as valid as astrology and that I could cast her chart and come up with as valid assumptions as she was spouting.
I continued to test INTJ when she made us re-take the test, and I guess my score was why I considered her a complete blithering idiot. Finally she got fired for incompetence.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
A coworker recently worked at a very large retail company. ALL prospective employees take a test like this (cashiers, back office and IT). It has a big impact on what kinds of jobs they consider you for and how far up the ladder you can advance.
It is unwise to ascribe motive
have to take and "pass" these tests also? Or are they just used to weed out from the disposable peons?
Unfortunately, or fortunately, these tests are highly transparent in nearly every possible degree. Almost all of them derive from OCEAN one way or the other, so in evaluating each question, the only necessary determination is the focus of the question; which part of the Big Five is being addressed currently? Figure that out, and answer toward the more socially accepted norm: extroversion in favor of introversion, be highly agreeable, avoid neuroticism, etc. Juggle your answers so they're not all perfect and boom, ideal candidate.
I've only had one employer ever subject me to a personality test, and I never heard back from them. Of course, this was when I was about to graduate college and enter the work force, and nearly ten years ago. Since then, I've learned enough to chuckle at the test, hand it back unanswered and leave the interview. They're too subjective, easily circumvented, and like France's handwriting analysis, and similar evaluation methods, are effectively mumbo-jumbo akin to phrenology or palm reading. There are simply different types of people in the world; knowing which type is applying for a particular situation isn't a predictor for success or failure; even after having possible correlations identified by double-blind studies, I'd be skeptical about strongly associating specific types to specific job duties.
I'm not entirely sure how this got started, but It's illogical to participate, in my opinion.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
... and the same people who pioneer this ridicule Astrology. Oh the wisdom of the managers.
The best personality test would be the Milgram Experiment, where you come in sit down at the controls of someone hooked up to an electric shock machine and then someone in authority, say the perspective employer, tells to you shock the guy sitting down at progressively higher levels until the guy is just screaming in pain. However, the guy is not really hooked up, he is just acting. What would be really interesting is for people that know the guy is acting if they would play along and back off to show he is not cruel or go try to impress the employer and make the actor scream.
When I was unemployeed this summer, I applied to be a teller at a bank. Sure, it wouldn't have been a great job, but it would be better than no job.
They picked my resume out of the stack. Called me up, and directed me to take their oline-personality test. It consisted of questions like "how many hours a week do you talk on the phone?", "how many nights a week do you go out with friends?", and other completely non-job-related questions.
After I took the test online, it came up "failed". I called the company, they told me that nothing else matters, only the personality test.
I didn't matter that I had a college degree with a minor in business. It didn't matter that I already had experience in a similar position. It didn't matter that I had superb customer service skills and glowing recommendations from former bosses. All that mattered to them was the silly test.
Personality tests are nuthin, wait till they start genetic testing...
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
*Very well. (I find fools and idiots the easiest to dominate)
*About the same as normal. (i.e. undocumented spaghetti)
*Is that an exclusive 'or'? (change subject after interviewer's clarification)
*0 (its a pretty rough estimate. within 6 orders of magnitude of the actual value)
*As long as you leave the gag in your mouth. (screams upset my delicate constitution)
*real programmers use butterflies (C-x M-c M-butterfly)
*all of them. in an encrypted volume, no justification required.
*trick question: I would not run to work to fix a downed computer. Walk maybe. More like a mozie.
*none. (none if it is *wasted*)
*http://www.google.com/search?q=GNU+Manifesto
*clients, pinheads. po-tay-to, po-ta-to.
TFA Quote:
"The way in which the answers relate to the job requirements is...not obvious," says Dr. Scarborough, a Ph.D. industrial psychologist. And when applicants can't easily see how test questions relate to the job, "they tend to respond honestly to the questions," providing "a built-in design safeguard against 'gaming' or cheating."
Their personality test designer even says that they "[don't want you to] see how test questions relate to the job".
Why shouldn't an applicant know what the job requirements are?
How is it "cheating" to guess how the employer want applicants to behave? The same salesgirl that falls all over a customer might not even look at him outside work.
"Discrimination" as you call it is legal, unless is it due to race, national origin, religion, gender, disability, etc, i.e., a "suspect class." I love this silly idea that any type of different treatment is "discrimination."
Not being hired because you tested as a difficult, no social skill borderline Asperger's personality isn't discrimination under any law I have heard of, any more than if you came off that way in an interview. Life is full of hard knocks, and you simply can't sue your way out of every one of them.
What next, a girl doesn't date you because you aren't handsome or rich enough and you sue her? Under what cause of action? The Lakers won't sign be because I am short and can't jump and I am in my 40's? Discrimination. NASA won't make me an astronaut because I don't have an advanced science degree or any pilot experience? Discrimination!
George Will makes this point in his recent column, although as a lawyer I think he blames the wrong culprits (lawyers).
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Why everyone in Human Resources should be fired.
What is the most important job for the government, which
'belongs' to all of us?
Counter-Espionage, yet FBI hired and promoted Robert Hanssen.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,221911,00.html
Personality tests and even Polygraph Tests are lazy crutches
for Human Resources.
http://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml
Is this an historical pattern of Non-scientific methods and magic?
Salem Witch Trials
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm
In the Civil War, the North had the big advantage of money (all the
gold was in New York City), factories, naval blockade, large armies.
What General did Abraham Lincoln Hire That ALMOST LOST THE WAR?
General George McClellan was ill for a time, which further delayed his action, but on his return he continued to find reasons not to move forward. Frustrated, Lincoln at one point sent General McClellan a note asking whether, if the general did not plan to use his army, he, Lincoln, might borrow it.
What did the Washington HUMAN RESOURCES think of General Grant, who
eventually WON THE WAR?
General U. S. Grant, graduate of West Point was a DRUNKARD
and had been cashiered from the Army because of that problem.
Even after his convincing victories at Forts Henry, Donelson, and at the Battle of Shiloh, there were still grave doubts in Washington about his competence.
Would Einstein have been hired when he had few references?
Einstein tried to 'argue with his professors.'
Please, the following is a joke, FICTIONAL humor.
Would MOST Human Resources have been hired after passing a STRICT MENSA TEST (high IQ) and programming test?
Human Resources is in charge of salaries and EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION.
Almost ALL OF HUMAN RESOURCES at HR Conferences say ethics is VERY IMPORTANT,
yet they may be hypocritical?
stock option manipulation
http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/010282.html
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/18/technology/monster_options/index.htm
precisely. In fact I went to Gateway later and told them that I might still be willing to work for them (I was one of the highest-rated techs in the area at the time), as long as I did not have to deal with their "employment firm". They told me that was what they hired them for, and there would be no exceptions. My reply was, "Well, good luck then, you'll need it. Bye!"
Geeks have personalities? I guess I didn't get the memo. Where do I go to get mine?
Exactly.
After acquiring technical aka special skills in your field, learn how to manipulate and use people.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I've worked with dozens of personality tests and find each one has its merits and weaknesses. The power of each test depends on the psychological model that underlies it. For instance, Myers-Briggs is based on Carl Jung's framework.
One new model I found to be extremely valuable is Steven Rudolph's concept of Multiple Natures, which build's off of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.
Gardner has posited that the brain consists of 8 distinct intelligences, namely, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, logical, visual, musical, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. He explains intelligences not as skills, but as abilities. Their strength seems to be a combination of nature and nurture, i.e., you are born with certain genetic predispositions in each of these areas, but the atmosphere you're raised in makes a big difference in the degree to which they are realized.
Rudolph has added another layer to MI called Multiple Natures (MN). He describes these as tendencies, or rather, what you do with your intelligences. These include protective, educative, administrative, creative, healing, entertaining, providing, entrepreneurial, and adventurous.
It is MN that really rounds out the picture. It's one of the first models to genuinely make sense of how personality types link directly to *careers*.
to help the candidate determine that he or she wouldn't want to work at a place run by the kind of idiots that think this test is a good idea.
I will say up front that I don't have much confidence in this test, if it is based on Jungian psychology. Well, we'll see.
Agreed. And I'm surprised that so many people here seem to have accepted the notion of "personality" as a measurable construct for which there could be a valid and reliable test. Although we see ourselves and others as having continuous, stable identities, this is largely illusional. Human behaviour is highly situation specific - you'd have to be fairly mentally disordered to be as stable in your behaviours as these tests suggest.
I find it interesting that theses companies are doing the personality testing first and then checking if they can do the job applied for. Kind of explains a lot.
I answered this test as honestly as I could (which, as I stated before, is difficult because of the ambiguity of the questions), and the result was... not even close!
Nobody I know would describe me in the terms that the explanations of my "Jungian" personality type did. Oh, they might mention that I have some of those qualities... but they are anything but the predominant features of my personality.
Actually, the descriptions of my determined "personality type" very much resembled, to me, the kind of descriptions you get from astrologers. Vague, complementary... the kind of thing lots of people would like to believe about themselves. You can hardly lose, making such predictions!
I am very far from impressed. I will go back there later, "cheat" on the test, and see how I do.
I first saw this in the early 90's or so. Text included, to avoid melting the server (which I don't believe is canonical anyway)
http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/Hacker/interview.php
"How do you work in a team situation when all the other team members are fools and idiots?"
I SHINE !!
"How well do you program under the influence of hard drugs?"
I SHINE EVEN MORE !
"Have you ever beaten or killed a co-worker?"
COURSE. not.
"Give me a rough estimate of the maximum dollar amount that you've stolen from each of your previous employers."
BUT THEY OWED ME !
"Do you object to bullwhips in the workplace?"
NOT AS LONG AS I HAVE A HOLD OF THE HANDLE.
"Emacs or vi?"
OOo
"You have a large network of Suns being used by secretaries for word processing in FrameMaker. Which GNU packages would you install for your own entertainment, and how would you justify them later?"
WINDOWS IS PRETTY ENTERTAINING.
"You see a wounded puppy bleeding and whimpering on the side of the road while you're running to work to fix a downed computer that tens of users are waiting for. Do you let the puppy die?" "Why not?"
YOU"RE ASSUMING I SAVED THE PUPPY ? AIN'T MY DOG.
"How much of your workday would you waste by reading news?"
WHO READS NEWS ?
"Recite the GNU Manifesto."
FOSS ROCKS !
"How many clients (30% diskless, 60% dataless, 10% /var/spool/mail only) can a Sun 600MP server serve simultaneously, and what relation does this have to angels and pinheads?"
DON"T F**K WITH ANGELS, YOU PINHEAD !
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
My father, a civil engineer, once worked for a Phoenix company that employed another kind of test--long, pointless, exhausting tests and interview questions for candidates, followed at the end of the day with one or two questions that were actually important. He, too, was in a hiring position, and informed that it was "all about wearing them down" so they would give honest responses at the end out of sheer impatience with the process. Put me in mind of the tests they put applicants through in Men in Black...
Sounds like TestFirst.