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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?
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.
"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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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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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!
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.
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.
I know that was a joke, but it brings up a real point:
The problem with ALL such "true/false" personality tests is that there are frequently good reasons for answering the "wrong" way, that the test-makers did not anticipate:
"I frequently hurt small animals... I was raised as a Buddhist, but I eat chicken and eggs."
"I feel guilty when I masturbate... because the wife is trying to get pregnant, but she is out of town today."
And so on. Maybe silly examples, but they are examples.
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.
I call BS. I interviewed at Google, for a dev position, fell through at the final stage of things.
I never had to take a personality test. Lots of technical interviews (four levels, if I recall correctly), but no personality test.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
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.
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
It's simple really. They are weeding out the people who are too stupid to lie and play the game. Having a brain will only take you so far in any aspect of life.
It starts with your parents, you learn what they want to see and hear from their model child and how to manipulate them. Then school. Understanding the material is great and in an ideal world students would be judged strictly by how well they understand the material. All students who learn what they are supposed to be learning would get A's. Instead the difference between A and B (and sometimes even C) students is how well they play the game and tell the teachers what they want to hear (or are pretending they want to hear, they are playing the game too after all). In college where half your life is spent writing papers it is even worse, you have to learn to read the professors and tell them what they want to hear. You can tell from their personalities what 'insights' into the material they would love to hear from you. This is tougher, than is a general parent standard, a general high school and grade school personality you can rely on. Professors much be gauged individually. And finally there is work, fortunately, corporate whore is more or less one personality type that can be used to get hired.
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.
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.
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