Sounds fair, and that’s definitely how I would respond in that situation unless I saw someone who was obviously frantically searching for the money.
Actually, I think that’s a trick question. They know no one would honestly look for the owner, so if you answer “Yes”, they know you’re a liar who is just trying to BS through the test.
Lemme guess–the instructions said to be truthful and instead you “answered the questions the way I thought they wanted them answered.” And now you are mad you didn’t get the job. :rolleyes:
Some sophisticated personality tests are constructed by getting a pool of questions (the more non-obvious the better) and then seeing what questions differentiate between groups of people who are X and those who are Y. For example, you could (theoretically) get people who admit to drug use and those who don’t and give them a test of 1000 questions. Out of those, some would be answered with fair consistency one way by one group and another by the other group. Here’s the kicker–the content of the question doesn’t matter. All that matters if if the questions predict pretty consistently. So if the questions “I like green beans,” “Maroon is my favorite color” and “I always open doors for the handicapped” predict, those make up your scale.
The test you took probably had a BS scale–people told to lie and make themselves look good answered the way you did, so you got caught.
This was my thought as well. I’ve worked (on the hiring end) for companies that used this kind of personality test, and there are certain questions that are basically put in there as bullshit detectors.
Ooh, ooh, ooh. A potential Americans with Disabilities Act violation!
That sort of mindfuckery would be more understandable if he were applying for a position at the CIA, but he did say it was a restaurant job. (I’m going to assume that likely means “cook” or “waiter” and not “Chief Financial Officer for McDonald’s Corporation.”)
I’d be a little bemused if I came to interview for a job waiting tables at Olive Garden, only to be led to a backroom where a scowling F. Lee Bailey was waiting to hook me up to a polygraph.
Can you give an example? I’ve always heard this but I can’t picture how this works.
Many years ago, when I got a job at a bookstore, I had to take one of these. Because the store manager (who decided she wanted to hire me) had to provide me the test (which the corporate office graded) she told me to write in very light pencil so she could “correct” it before submitting it.
IIRC, she did indicate that someone who said they NEVER lied and ALWAYS helped old ladies cross the street, etc. raised the bullshit flag. So, if taking such a test, it’s not a good idea to answer the way you think they want you to answer.
Or, it could just be your freaky stair climbing (thanks for the laugh, Bobotheoptimist).
As a pre-employment condition for a law enforcement job I took a standardized “is he insane” test. One of the questions was along the lines of does carrying a gun make you feel more powerful.
That sounds like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It’s got 500+ true-false questions that are all over the place, and used to be pretty standard. The danger was when a company used a computer to interpret the results rather than a psychologist. I remember a psychologist friend of mine administered it to my younger brother as a favor when by brother was wondering what to do with his life. He looked at the results, then asked me, “Did your brother just break up with his girlfriend?” Surprised, I told him that, yes, indeed, he had. It seems that his Heterosexuality Index, or some such, was very low. If a machine had been scoring the results, my brother would probably have had someone trying to get him to deal with his denial of his homosexuality.
I had to take a personality test for my job at Circle K, and it was pretty obvious what the answers were supposed to be. “If you saw a coworker stealing money from the store, would you report him?”
What a crock.
I tried to find a link to the MMPI (Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory) a commonly used personality test. Note that this test is used to determine potential personality disorders, not as a requirement for job applicants. Of course, I couldn’t find sample questions, but some that I remember were along the lines of: I am scared of dead people. I always have perfect table manners. I frequently hallucinate.
As has been said, the questions themselves do not say that you are lying, it is the overall responses to the series of questions that are graded on the “lie scale”. So saying yes to one does not mean the respondent is lying. Saying yes to all does not mean that the person is lying. It is a tool to explore the answers.
Sorry for the hijack.
Sgt Schwartz
(bolding mine)
Is it possible that you not really wanting the job was somehow conveyed to the interviewer? I’m not saying it was consciously done, of course; through body language, enthusiasm (or lack thereof) and the way you phrased answers to questions both verbally and on paper you may have unintentially sabotaged the interview.
Actual questions on a test I took for the Army once:
Do you like to draw flowers?
If you were a painter, would you paint flowers?
WTF?
Let me continue to hijack. IIRC, I think another strategy the MMPI uses is that they ask the same basic questions in different ways, scattered throughout the test. If the answers are inconsistent with each other, assumption of truthfulness goes way down.
Somebody wrote a book, but darned if I can remember who, about how to “beat” the various psychological tests. I vaguely remember the chapter on the Roschach test. Saying the blot looks like a butterfly is fine, but that it looks like your mother bleeding definitely is not. (OK, I exaggerate, but it was something like that).
You know the can’t ask you outright!
I applied for a retail management job once for a company that used one of those stupid quizzes. I knew a manager there and she told me the reason they couldn’t hire me is because I answered “yes” to the question, “Do you point out to people when they have made a mistake or done something wrong?” They thought I would be too critical of the employees. :rolleyes:
I worked for a pizza place once where the manager included four or five questions on the job application as a sort of idiot filter. Things like “who is the current President of the United States,” “What city is our state capital” (which happened to be the city we were in) and “If a customer gives you a $10 bill for a $5 order, how much change do you hand them?”
I laughed when I saw it, but during the time I worked there I saw several people apply who didn’t get a single answer correct.
As a psychologist, I’m always amazed by the “personality tests” that some employers use. I’d like to see the reliability and validity information, test construction, adverse impact, relevance to job performance data, etc., myself. Some of thse questionnaires I’ve seen appear to ask questions that are illegal as well.
Too late to edit and add:
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The “black, tarry stools” item was removed from the MMPI when it was revised and renormed, which was many years ago.
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There is no “heterosexuality index.” There is a masculine/feminine scale which does nothing and is generally not even reported on by most psychologists. It doesn’t correlate well to other measures of masculinity/femininity (whatever those constructs are). So why is it there? To screen homosexuals out of army service decades ago, of course. Insert rolleyes here.
Machine scoring isn’t the problem; machine interpretation without human follow-up is lousy and unethical.
Test security issues preclude me from saying more than this: No, that is not correct or useful. Despite what you might see on television, no test, including the Rorschach, uses single answers to determine whether you’re in the okay range or not, and there are not correct answers per se.
If you don’t want to take a test that is being requested for legal reasons (say, a custody determination), politely state that you do not want to take the test and/or that you have read information about the test that is likely to invalidate the results, or that you would like the examiner to obtain the data in a different way. There may be consequences, but they are probably better than the consequences of trying to scam the tests.
This test was definitely designed with the “catch them lying” questions phrased in different ways and in one case the same exact question three times. Like I said I’ve taken these tests before and gotten jobs so I’m not sure what happened here. I felt I was consistent but maybe he just didn’t like what he saw. I’m not sure. I thought the personal part of the interview though short, went pretty well. I’ve got another interview tomorrow doing a data entry type job. Let us hope if they give a test it doesn’t ask about stairs.