I remember when I was still in high school looking for a part time job at the mall or wherever a lot of places had you take their 7,000 question “personality test” before they would consider interviewing you. Generally speaking the right answer was painfully obvious (“It is okay to steal from your employer” - yes or no?) and supposedly it was designed to weed out the stupidest applicants. That sort of made sense in a job where you had someone handling cash and processing transactions but otherwise the tests seemed pretty meaningless to me. It seemed like these tests, much like the pre-employment drug screening test, were mainly to remind you that you were at the mercy of the employer. They, not you, controlled everything and you had to give them everything from your personality to your bodily fluids in exchange for your $7 an hour.
Now that I am easing my way back into the workforce after a baby raising hiatus I am finding that quite a few companies are using these assessments for positions where they don’t make any sense at all. In my experience once you got up past about $30k a year in salary employers seemed to assume that if you sucked that bad as a person you’d be looking for employment at the minimum wage level and they didn’t bother with personality tests, drug tests, etc. Now even though the jobs that I’m applying for pay significantly more than that and often require licensing through the state many are throwing this personality test back into the mix. At this level they don’t ask the simple theft questions any longer, it is more about “I am more of a leader than a follower” and “my coworkers would describe me as outgoing” reworded over and over to try and trick you into answering differently than you did the first 16 times they asked that question. Other than a sense of dominance what the hell do employers get out of this test? None of the positions I’ve been applying for have access to cash or even merchandise of any kind so theft isn’t a concern and they aren’t even asking questions to which the answers would be useful to them so it doesn’t seem like they are gaining anything from the testing process. Is this just to stop getting resumes from people people who submit resumes to every posting on every job board? Do they just want you to take 45 minutes to upload a resume and take this test to see if you really are a human being and not some sort of spambot that is desperate for work?
It does suck, doesn’t it? My husband recently applied to work at a Very Important University here in Silicon Valley, and he had to endure a 45-minute test of this sort. What’s more, the university is attached to a hospital, and the test defaults to the assumption that all applicants are looking for nursing positions. My husband is an engineer type.
So he just did the best he could, all the while snorting with disgust and disbelief.
You have a point about weeding out numbskulls and spambots, I suppose. HR departments must get deluged with resume submissions and they probably want to reduce the traffic.
These tests have become more sophisticated in the process. Employers will keep the answers and adjust their scoring system based on the experiences with employees hired. They are often now screening out people who are overqualified or they predict will not stay long term based on the answers. Pretty sad I think.
The interviewing process really only answers three questions:
Do you think you can do the job?
Do we think you can do the job?
Do we think we want you working for us?
They’re just trying to get an answer to question 3 as cheaply and simply (from their point of view) as possible. Send you a form to fill out and feed it into the test scanner and voila! you’re a winner! Or not. Much much much better from their point of view than actually talking to you.
Much cheaper than talking to you perhaps, but I wonder how many really excellent people companies are turning down without ever talking to them based on these test results.
I’ve had to do a particularly ridiculous one, but it doesn’t bother me. There are a handful of personality types that are extremely hard to work with- the control freak, the emotional ticking time bomb, the person who can’t adapt to change, etc. A lot of these traits are unlikely to come across in an interview. If the personality tests help sort out people on the extremes, why not use them?
I was temping at a business and they bought my contract to be a real employee. I had already worked there for a few months, knew what the job entailed, showed I was worthy. I had to take the personality tests and I almost didn’t get the job because the HR rep thought I was overqualified and would get bored and leave.
HR tries to find new ways to justify their existence. Instead of just dealing with the insurance programs and being the inn-house ref for harassment issues, they try to stick their fingers into everyone’s pie and hiring is the place they do dumb shit stuff because “hey, we’re experts at that!”
HR is just a scam run by cretins. Why they would want to exclude cretins from their workplace eludes me. If they excluded all cretins, there would be no HR left! Oh, I get it. Having gotten themselves in, they then want to exclude all potential competition.
And personality tests are a pseudo-scientific scam too. They are generally proprietary tests, pushed by the companies that publish them, and marketed to HR departments as the ultimate tool for their hiring decision making. Yes, the scammers are scamming the scammers.
And more and more companies, at least as far as the HR departments and management go, don’t seem really to give a fucking rat’s ass if employees are actually, you know, competent and good for doing any useful work. All they care about any more is getting a crew of sycophantic ass-licking yes-men and yes-women who can all get along with Pointy-Haired Boss.
The Myers-Briggs personality test is one such. It’s just so much drivel, but apparently a whole shit-load of employers and HR people have been duped into swearing by it. There is a page on it in the Skeptic’s Dictionary, here: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
I don’t know what sort of jobs you’re applying for, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a personality test as part of the hiring process.
I’ve taken plenty of personality tests at work though (Meyers Briggs and the DISC framework seem to be most popular). Usually they are used as more of a management training tool to teach how people process and interpret information differently.
Personally I think these tests are a great idea for hiring. It spares me the hassle of having to determine someone is an extroverted imbecile or a brilliant by socially inept and withdrawn genius by actually meeting them in person! Seriously though, most experts seem to think these tests aren’t particularly useful for hiring purposes. If you get a entire company of ENTJs or [D]irect communicators, nothing will get done because everyone will try and dominate and no one will back down.
Companies are run like a feudal hierarchy. There seems to be very little “working your way up from the mailroom” these days. Mostly companies want the “best and the brightest” for their six figure management tracks so they look for certain things - Ivy League or top school degrees, MBAs, Fortune 500 management training programs, investment banking or management consulting experience.
If you are not in that track of “highly motivated, self actualizing leaders”, you are in the dronery. The people who the company needs to do the actual work. The company will typically assume that you are smart and motivated enough to perform whatever technical task you are being hired for. But that’s pretty much all they want you to do (and love doing it).
Review resumes, send out open ended questionnaire that directly deals with their job duties, interview, personality test, interview with other key co workers, background check.
I recently hired a sixty year old for a key position. He was more than qualified, decades of direct experience. But we have just made the transition to paperless. He admitted weakness in this area, but was willing to learn. Exactly what anyone would say.
Testing said he was very adaptive, he was hired. He’s doing well, and asks all the right questions.
I probably wouldn’t have hired him otherwise.
Testing is not infallible, but it’s another tool. I’ve had skills tests come back with 8% reading comprehension. That’s scary. Also helps with’fit’ Some bosses can’t stand independence, I require it.
You’re conflating three different kinds of tests here: tests for personality, tests for honesty/ethics, and tests for intelligence/stupidity.
If a test really is designed to test personality, it’s not designed to trick you or to prevent theft, but to see if you’re a good fit for the position. If it’s for a sales job, for example, they want to see if you have a personality type that matches that (I, for example, don’t).
But that’s not what they’re used for, or how they’re used.
The way the process works is:
HR person or headhunter gets a request to find someone for a job, let’s call it Chief Auctionator-Auditor.
Person defines a Personality Profile that (s)he believes will be appropriate for a Chief Auctionator-Auditor. Problem is, often Person doesn’t know what are the tasks of a Chief Auctionator-Auditor, how such a person is supposed to relate to coworkers at all levels, or what the corporate culture involved is like. Does a Chief Auctionator-Auditor work alone or in teams? Does one manage people, supervise them, is it perhaps a technical manager position (these give instructions to a lot of people but have no direct subordinates)? Person does not know, but not only would (s)he not want to lose face by asking; often, if (s)he asked, the requester wouldn’t be able to answer in ways that Person would find meaningful. It wouldn’t be the first time I go to a place that’s announced as “casual” and find it’s so tight you can play the air currents like violin strings: a test designed to find people who work best in casual environments won’t be good to find workers for a place like that.
Person selects whomever fits the Personality Profile best.
If step 2 is done right, the tests are a great tool. If it’s not, they’re not.
I had a thread in here a while ago about a more advanced personality /trait test done by a company that supposedly was in place to ensure the ‘maximum potential’ from applicants.
More or less it was modern office HR sales speak accompanied by your favorite Tony Roberts or Zig Ziggler quotes.
It’s all lazy nonsense by companies so they have a reason to have a HR department.
The best thing we can do is straight up turn down any company that requests something so ridiculous.
Maybe one day they’ll ge it through their heads that your personality is none of their business.
I had to take a Predictive Index test for my current job. That was on top of a technical skills test that was much more important. Luckily I scored just the way they wanted on the PI test, arrogant, outlandish jackass traits dominating all other personality characteristics. I think it’s all bullshit, but I gotta say I work for a great company, most places are probably looking for the docile subservient types. You gotta feel sorry for the managers in our company though.
I temped for a very short time at a small office that did “Emotional Intelligence” seminars. Before they even looked at me they had me do their online “emotional intelligence” test. All I did was choose the answers that I knew they wanted to see.
Depending on the job, some places may get 500 applications for every available job opening. I found that out last Christmas when I applied for some temporary jobs and never got called at all.
Of course, the fact that I have a degree that is now completely worthless in a field I don’t want to go back to anyway, and also prevents me from getting a job doing anything else may have a lot to do with it as well. :rolleyes:
I think this is the reason. Especially for a job like sales, you need someone who is optimistic, fairly resilient and bounces back quickly from rejection.
On the other hand, for a CFO you might want someone more cautious or pessimistic.
My company uses these, pioneered them frankly, and they are remarkably accurate and valuable. There’s really no such thing as a “passing” grade. The result is a personality profile that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. We don’t give it to applicants until we’ve already decided to bring them in for an interview. There is a practical test as well that weeds out the dummies (actually, only like 5% of applicants pass so that’s a bit glib) but the personality portion isn’t factored into the decision to bring you in. The reuslts (not the responses to questions, but the composite they generate) are given to the hiring manager so that he or she can probe for specific things during the interview. The program actually suggests questions based on this profile to make it easier.
This isn’t really a bad thing for applicants. If you’re a very analytical person who likes a structured environment we probably won’t ask a hundred questions about your analytical skills. If you get bored easily doing repetitive tasks, we might explain the job for you to make sure that it is really what you want so we don’t waste each other’s time. If you are very customer focused we’ll be sure that you’re in a role that suits you.
Long story short, the personality profile doesn’t filter you out. It just attempts to help us match you to a job that fits you and not a job that just happens to be open. When you’re out of work you won’t like this because you’ll be thinking to yourself “I’ll take anything!” but from the employers point of view we don’t want to train and teach people to do a job they’ll just leave in 3 months for a better fit elsewhere. If you fit a job both parties will be happier in the long run, and ultimately the manager gets to make the call on if you’re a fit with the personality profile as a simple guide of areas to dig deeper on.