Personality tests when job hunting...WTF?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I work as a supervisor at a call center for a major outsourcing company. We (as a company) are almost always hiring for something, and we use one of these to filer people. When I’m doing interviews, I get a sheet where the person has filled out some basic open-ended questions (it’s tech support, so the open-ended questions are “Name three pieces of hardware that are common on a computer, name three pieces of software that are common to a computer, name any operating systems that you’re familiar with.”), and two categories that are Red, Yellow and Green. The first category is “Service Orientation” and the second is “Technical aptitude” These are further broken down into “Attendance and dependability, Service Orientation, Empathy” and “Technical Aptitude, Service Orientation” (I assume the second one is different, because sometimes someone will be green on one and yellow on the other).

In our project, we have three entry-level lines of business, and we’ve been doing this system for about a year and a half, so we’ve fed a lot of info back into the system, and Recruiting’s bonuses are based on how good our retention rate is, so it’s in their interest to feed the best possible information into the system. We know, from experience, that someone who scores a red on any of the overalls, or in Tech aptitude or empathy just will not cut it. Anyone who’s a yellow on tech can go for two of the lines of business, but rarely does well in the third (the one I do). I also know from looking at the open-ended questions that… oh, this person doesn’t even know what an Operating System IS, but scored well at tech, so they probably are a fast learner and smart, but not a lot of knowledge (NBD, I can teach them), OR, they listed a million Operating Systems but yellow or red on tech, they’re probably a know-it-all jerk who will be terrible with customers (That’s… a lot harder to teach).

I never make hiring decisions based on the recruiting page (I’ve told recruiting “no” on people who are all green, but I thought just wouldn’t fit in with our project.), although it’s given me a guide sometimes to ask some pointed questions.

Overall, the questionaire thing has been helpful for me as a hiring manager. It was pretty silly at first, because it was really generic, but we’ve been able to feed a lot of data back into the system, and it’s learned… these days, I’m usually pretty confident in the answers it spits out at me, and lets me churn through things quickly when I have three interviews backed up.

42

It looks like there is a very big difference between good tests and bad ones and that the confusion related to the tests is caused primarily by the bad tests. I will say I’ve never believed for a moment that there were no right or wrong answers like the tests stated, but that might be because the bad versions of these tests have answers that feel right or wrong. Having heard from people here who use these tests and find them helpful I do feel better about the process and less like I need to select answers based on what they expect instead of the one I believe is the most accurate. I will try to remind myself in the future when faced with one of these that it isn’t just for the company to come up with a reason not to hire me but also to prevent me from taking a job and finding I’m not a good fit and hating it until I find something better.

43

I know it’s hard not to be cynical, but companies WANT to hire people. They really want to hire good people. This is all designed to help companies hire the right people faster, which should work to everyone’s advantage.

10 years ago a hiring manager would interview 12 people, 12 of a pool of 60 picked somewhat arbitrarily based off resume details, fortunate timing and sometimes idiotic things like cover letter font, card stock, fraternity affiliation, quality of handshake etc. They’d then spend up to 4 hours cumulatively with each candidate vetting them. Do the math, that’s wasting at least a week of that manager’s year. If you’re not one of those 12 you have no shot and the odds the manager is going to do another round of hiring is unlikely unless desperate.

Today, that 60 applicants might be 100 and of that 100 maybe 40 will get a good look because of the automated testing and ranking. A manager will actually spend 30 quality minutes with those 40. Ultimately, if you’re a good candidate your odds are better today than they were before. If you’re a bad candidate, well your odds went down.

44

That’s hysterical, because my honest answer would also be the opposite, for the same reason (campaign for whatnow? Why on earth would I want to do that?) and it’s at least somewhat accurate in that I work hard at the things I care about; and I’m, shall we say, not exactly a rose-colored optimist. I describe myself as a realist, but also acknowledge that reality has a pessimistic bias. :smiley:

Well, you can read my previous post on this as well, but I get “bent out of shape” because these things don’t produce “actual data,” and yes, I think an in-person interviewer would be a better assessor of my personality than an arbitrary, computerized answer key. I’d also have the opportunity to demonstrate how I’ve adapted my personality to my work and working environments with concrete examples of how I’ve used it to my employer’s advantage.

A personality assessment can be useful in the context of therapy, but then again, in that context your therapist actually talks to you too, and can formulate a treatment plan based on a holistic picture of the person. Using it for hiring is inaccurate and a misuse of what these things were designed to measure.

C. Talk to my boss and ask for her/his preference.

But that’s not an option, is it? So how does this measure anything accurately about me again?

45

Really? Tests aren’t perfect, but you think another human being, who will judge you on your weight, attractiveness, clothing, gender, handshake, posture, eye contact, race, and all sorts of other arguably irrelevant traits, is less arbitrary?

I think you’re missing the point. It’s supposed to restrict your choices. You could make “It depends” or “whatever my boss wants” a choice for every question, but what would that tell you? Other than, maybe, you don’t have a high level of personal initiative.

46

Man, I don’t know what this says about me, but aside from the hardware question (motherboard, RAM, CPU. Obviously others as well, but those are pretty integral), those are really hard – probably due to overthinking. What do you mean by “three pieces of software”? Do you mean three pieces of software almost all desktop computers have by default (i.e. text editor, browser, some sort of terminal/command prompt, graphical filesystem navigator, etc), or do you mean common commercial software like Microsoft Office?

The OS question would really worry me, because I know the names of quite a few OSs that I actually know nothing about. For instance, I know about Plan9 because a programming language I use has a Plan9 implementation. I know nothing else about it, I just said “huh… that’s an OS? Quaint, cute name too.” I know about OS/2 because a professor at my university had a freakin Dilbert comic mentioning it on his wall. I know the names of a bunch of old obscure mainframe operating systems because teachers have mentioned working on them back when they were in school. Should I put those? I wouldn’t be able to say anything about them other than “yup, I’ve definitely heard the name!” Should I count distros of Linux as separate? If so, should I count all the different Windows over the years as separate? My intuition is to just put “Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android*, Chromium” and not even bother mentioning BSD, zOS, OS/360, SHARE and others that I’ve mostly just heard of in passing, but that question would gnaw at my nightmares for years.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the questions, I’m just crazy.

  • (Yeah, Android is modified Linux, I don’t care)

My worry with the second answer is the implication of “don’t tell anybody why you didn’t submit your project.” My preference would be to extend the deadline and get it done, in general, but I sure as hell ain’t doing it without letting someone know. That’s the surest way to cause untold mayhem. I think the question would be better if it said something more like “request a deadline extension from your supervisor” or “present your case to the client/supervisor that the product needs more time in development” or even “send an email to your boss saying YOU CAN’T HAVE IT YET NEENER NEENER NEENER”. Just blindly trudging along past deadlines without notifying anyone seems to be what the question is implying and is just a bad idea. So it hits the conundrum: second answer because I’d prefer to keep working, or first answer because it implies communication?

47

I’ve already said it: I have the opportunity to actually talk to them, answer their questions, and explain how my personality and skills have benefited employers in the past and could benefit them in the future. If you don’t think that’s better than being blindly screened out by not matching the arbitrarily chosen “correct” answers, as determined by a computer filtering your responses against an answer key with no human intervention, well before any human even sees your resume, then I don’t know what to tell you. I’m repeating myself here: whatever you may assess about my personality (most likely inaccurately to begin with), says nothing at all about how I’ve adapted my skills and behaviors in the workplace. But if someone thinks introversion is “bad” or “wouldn’t fit” in their office, I’m SOL. Never mind that I’ve spent years developing my networking skills, to the extent that people are surprised when I tell them I’m an introvert.

We’re talking about questionnaires that ask such beauties as: If you work more than what you are paid for, you are only cheating yourself, agree/disagree. I’m sure my application went into the black hole of their database, and no human ever saw it, even though I’ve done the exact job before, AND have a lot of high-level customer service experience that the majority of their applicants would lack. I wish I could say I didn’t get a human interview because I was overqualified, but the automated response I got made it clear that no one but the computer saw any part of the information I’d given them. A person might have apprehended the value I could have brought to them. The computer, obviously, could not.

A person is not reducible to a series of yes/no questions. It is far too complex for that. If people want an accurate sense of who I am and what I’m capable of, they’re gonna have to suck it up and talk to me in person. Anything else, they’re only fooling themselves that they got a good picture.

:rolleyes: Or that I’m capable of communicating appropriately for important matters at work. I don’t think I’m the one missing the point here. Context matters. It is especially important if you hope for something resembling accuracy.

The question also presumes that I DO miss deadlines, which is another problem with them, the false hypothetical. I wouldn’t put myself in a campaigning situation, either, but I’m supposed to come up with a “real” answer to something that doesn’t happen in real life?

48

Where are you getting the idea that the answers are arbitrary? They’re not. You can measure your employees’ performance against their responses in the interview process, and many companies do.

I don’t know where you get the idea that you are a pessimistic person. You have a very optimistic explanatory style. Look at how you externalize misfortune: No human ever saw my application, the computer made a poor decision on me, I was better qualified than most of the applicants. You know none of that for certain. That’s an optimistic mindset. The pessimist focuses internally and says, “oh, I’m not good at filling out resumes” or “I must be at the bottom of the applicant pool.” These are important characteristics that a test can reveal, even if you don’t know them yourself. If I had asked you if you were a pessimist or optimist, you would presumably have chosen the former.

But people ARE reducible to 30 minutes of pat questions and pat answers?

49

I’ve done a lot of interviews through the years. There is a different dynamic when you sit on the other side of the desk. I’ve made mistakes. Testing gives me insights on candidates I may not see during the interview.

Kaio reminds me of sales guys who think if they can get in front of me, they don’t need to do anything else. Those days are gone.

I want long term employees who like what they do, and like working for my company. Why wouldn’t I do everything possible to make that happen? Isn’t that part of my job as the boss?

Our hiring practices also sets us apart, you know when you are hired you are part of a good company with good people. Not just a collection of schlubs. To answer the question, my crazy employee was hired years before I started doing this.
The hiring process is one of the easiest things I will ever ask you to do. Perhaps just asking you to take the test and your reaction is a good indicator of fit itself.

50

A pre-empoyment test that includes questions about whether it’s all right to steal from your employer sure would weed out the stupidest applicants.

Anyway, I can see, in principle, using a personality test to make sure you got only the right personalities (I’m not commenting on the legality or ethics of this, only whether companies would want to). But it seems to me it wouldn’t be very effective – because if I’m taking the test for insight about myself, I’m motivated to be as accurate as possible, but if I’m doing it for employment, I’m motivated to give the answers I think they’re looking for.

I’m not convinced the Myers-Briggs (or something along those lines, at least) is totally useless if you’re not planning to use it for anything important, and if you’re not going for a specific result, and if all you really want out of it is for it to tell you what you told it in a more concrete form. Employers that have people take a test are asking them to violate at least two of those three conditions.

51

I’ve done the personality tests, and the aptitude tests. All part of the game now.

But when I was job searching a couple of years ago, I ran into the oddest requirement on an application…

Write a poem about your last position.

It was good for a chuckle in the interview, and they said it’s basically to weed out the folks that “won’t do what it takes to get the job done,” or the “not my job” people.

52

Let’s say you are a huge company. You have literally hundreds of people working in essentially the same job. This is a lower-skilled job with typically high turnover.

You implement personality tests for everyone who applies. You discover that a certain personality type tends to excel at this job. It turns out that the personality type is even more important than their relevant experience, age, or sex.

This is one reason why companies use those tests. And why it can be a great idea.

53

Possibly. If they ever bothered to do even the most basic analysis of this type.
In practice, predictive validity testing of assessment instruments is very rare.

54

Yeah, blah blah, you are not a number.

Except that sometimes you are. If you are looking at a high-level position, this test is just going to be one of many, many data points. But if it’s a low-wage McJob, there is a good chance they really don’t care about how complex and amazing you are- they are looking for the absolute cheapest way of finding warm bodies who aren’t actively crazy, and it’s not worth what it costs to have a manager take the time to “get an accurate sense of who you are.”

These people owe you nothing. The average recruiter looks at a resume for a total of six seconds. It is what it is.

55

cite?

56

If you hadn’t related the explanation they gave, I’d have guessed it was a low-tech capcha, weeding out people who apply to jobs mechanistically without doing more than scanning the ad.

57

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443890304578006252019616768.html

58

I haven’t gotten to the meat of the article yet but the infographic gives me pause. It says “FOCUS ON ALCOHOL Test applicants on attitudes toward drugs and alcohol with questions like, ‘In the past four years I have not driven after I’ve been drinking.’”

If they’re trying to reduce accidents by identifying drinkers, this question sets the applicant up to fail. If they answer True - that they have not driven after drinking - they admit that they drink. But there are two ways to answer False - either they drive after drinking or they don’t drink.

The question as asked doesn’t disambiguate between drinker-drivers and non-drinkers. So what’s the right answer if you don’t drink?

59

There’s not enough information in that snippet to know for sure and it doesn’t even say what the answer choices are. While there are situations where a distinction like that doesn’t matter too much (i.e., I may only care that you don’t get behind the wheel drunk, regardless of whether it’s through teetotaling or prudent post-drinking behavior) I think the more fundamental problem with that question is that nobody will admit to drinking and driving.

60

Sorry it took me a few days to get back, but… yes, you’re overthinking it.

For something like this, they (I) am looking for the fact that you recognize that software is a program you can install. Answers that satisfy me are things like “Microsoft Office, Internet browser, Media Player.” Answers I don’t like are specific websites, pieces of hardware, or blanks (all things I get on a regular basis). This is a $9/ hr tech support job - don’t worry too hard!

The OS thing is the same way - I’m kind of looking for an understanding that you’re aware that computers don’t just work by magic, and that the differences between, say Mac and PC or this phone and that phone aren’t immutable constants. Again, for a $9/hr tech support job… that’s as complex as we get. What I like to see in this area is at least two versions of either Windows or Mac and one phone OS. I actually get a little nervous when I see obscure distros, or someone puts down something like “Windows 9.” People who do that are either way overqualified for what we want (Which is not a reason by itself to not hire - just means I need to be very clear about the fact that they’re getting underpaid for their skill set), or they’re full of bull (Windows 9 guy was clearly full of bull - those people make terrible employees, for a variety of reasons)

If you were applying for a job with me, I would recommend tailoring the kinds of responses you give for the type of thing they’re likely looking for - think of it as along the lines of hightliting certain things on a resume. My place is an outsourcing company, hiring people for relatively low wage tech support so we’re looking to rule out people who either don’t have enough base knowledge to teach what we need to know, or who are too full of BS to be coach-able and trainable. However, I’ve also helped with choosing folks for higher level positions, and they might be looking for someone different, and you would be wise to tailor your answers to the kinds of things they’re looking for. For terms of hiring, “Familiar with” usually means “can navigate basic functions, install and remove programs, and troubleshoot basic problems like freezing and network functions” If they want you to do more, they’ll usually say that explicitly.