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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.
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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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."
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.
I've never seen one where which answer went with which "type" wasn't completely obvious.
Just pick how you want it to turn out, and answer consistently. Piece of cake. I'd be shocked if anyone with half a brain did anything other than that.
Surely even if you try to answer it honestly you're unintentionally favoring the answers that you want to be true (or the ones that you believe to be expected) rather than the ones that are true.
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.
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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 see this along the same lines as the lookign down on not dressing up for an interview: an excellent early warning sign that the company and I are not going to be a good match for one another. As to whether this could be considered a form of discrimination, it certainly seems to flirt with it. Makes you wonder whether simply letting them be stupid isn't punishment enough.
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.
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.
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.
But that is still fudging, in the worst way! The test-makers are trying to add value to their tests by acknowledging that their tests do not work! They are simply trying to second-guess where and how badly they do not work, and put that information to use.
"Well, there is a great big hole in the test there, but we have managed to scrape together some spackle to cover it up... and we have some wood putty for over there...
Thanks, but I will take someone to lunch and get to know them instead.
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
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."
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
'Except you have NO IDEA how a "good employee" would answer.'
No in my experience. Corporate go-getter company policy licking droid is pretty much a standard across all large companies I've encountered. This thing is produced by HR and executive level management after all. Don't confuse actual on the job work habits and needs with the corporate ideal invented by HR and public facing front of the company. It isn't like your actual manager is going to bother reading the thing.
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.
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
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.