Personality Testing For Employment 581
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?
Re:Sounds accurate to me (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Let's See... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:If it were free-form, and not multiple choice, (Score:3, Informative)
From an Industrial Psychologist... (Score:2, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]), or predict job performance differently between members of the various classes, then that is not a concern.
From an Industrial Psychologist (Score:2, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. Scores on several scales in this measure have been demonstrated to correlate with job performance across a variety of jobs.
Political content of personality tests (Score:3, Informative)
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."
Re:I would like to hear from a lawyer on this.. (Score:4, Informative)
'As a teenager, I was always passed up because I couldn't "pass" the personality test on BestBuy.com'
Seriously, I have taken these tests. How could not be ABLE to pass one? Just think of any corporate orientation video you have ever seen, imagine one of the employees being portrayed in said video and answer accordingly.
You have no conflicts with other employees. You inform to management. You don't use drugs. You don't think any drug use is acceptable. You report all accident prone things and failure to follow safety procedures to the manager. You believe corporate policy should be followed 100% of the time no matter how ridiculous it would be to actually do that. Bam, simple, 90+% match on the personality test.
In other words, all you have to do is lie.
Re:Not technical (Score:2, Informative)
UMAT test (Score:2, Informative)
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?
Jobs in Norway (Score:2, Informative)
All the jobs I applied to in Norway (IT, development) had a personality test as part of the interview process.
Role Playing test (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I would like to hear from a lawyer on this.. (Score:4, Informative)
Polygraphs only determine if you lie or feel discomfort
Yes to the latter, no to the former. Polygraphy is security theater bullshit. It's designed to scare the ignorant and gullible into telling the truth. Anyone can beat a polygraph test. (see http://antipolygraph.org/ [antipolygraph.org] for more)
Re:I would like to hear from a lawyer on this.. (Score:3, Informative)
The summary doesn't make this clear, but having read the article in the newspaper, I'd clarify: what they're saying is that the HR people use this test to try to get a certain group of people, and the people who are taking the test *cheat* and pass the test, meaning HR is getting an entirely different group of people than they think they are -- a group much more likely to be problems. Your experience illustrates this well.
A *good* test checks for cheats, by asking trick questions that show when people are trying to game the test. The SAT works this way.
I had a similar experience years ago: I was working through a temp agency trying to get an engineering job and somehow they got my file shuffled into an entry-level assembly job interview, so they had me do a bunch of hand-eye coordination tests and then gave me a personality test like this. I answered honestly, including questions like "have you ever taken anything belonging to your workplace?" (Yes: my antistatic wrist strap, which I took home every day, as per instructions.) There were several questions like this, and by this time I'd realized they were confused but was having fun so just stayed with it. They got the computerized personality analysis back and the woman looked at it and said she didn't think I was a good fit for the job, or for any jobs they'd be likely to find for me, because of my personality type. I mentioned that I was looking at the engineering position, not assembly, and her face cleared up, she wadded up the paper, threw it away, and said "oh, well, you'll do great!" and I started my new job two weeks later.
As an aside, the sad thing about these jobs is that, as you say, if you *know* someone inside, or you're an exceptionally intelligent/capable person, they'll hire you despite the personality test. This is really only another tool to weed out people who are marginalized, and justify their marginalization.