My sympathies to anyone who’s had to take one of these idiotic, irrelevant tests.
In the past 5 years I’ve had several interviews for IT jobs with a particular company. All positions were in internal IT support - keep the servers running, keep the apps running, work on the website. No customer contact, no customer support.
So, what kinds of tests did they ask me to take *each time * I interviewed? A test evaluating salesmanship skills, naturally! The questions concerned language that can help make a sale, how to respond to reticence on the part of the potential customer, and so on. They would have made sense for a sales rep selling cars or appliances, anything where you have the customer face-to-face in a showroom. But the company appears to do most of its business via catalog sales and corporate contracts - they don’t have a brick-and-mortar retail outlet. They don’t sell large, expensive durable goods - they sell inexpensive consumables.
This company also has applicants take a version of the Myers-Briggs inventory. On my first interview, I was warned of this ahead of time. The night before, I poked around on the web to get a sense of what this “test” asks and what it purports to measure. I found a free, “for fun” online version of this test. Imagine my, um, “surprise” when I found that the company was using exactly the same test - they had applicants surf to the same free, “for fun” website that I had found.
I’m not sure what bothered me more - that HR couldn’t be bothered to pay for the full test and professional scoring/interpretation, or the fact that they didn’t even bother to try to hide their cheapness.
I think that’s fair. It’s been decades since I’ve been in the position of hiring, but I’ve done some interviewing and auditioning. From that experience I can conclude that a great number of interviewers have no idea what questions to ask, and so make up little games to convince themselves that they are doing smart work. It often borders on the occult. It’s nearly always a complete crap shoot.
Neither this, nor asking something like “Do you think most Americans think shoplifting is OK?” is necessarily dumb, as it turns out.
Apparantly, for example, if you want to know how much a person drinks, you don’t ask “How much do you drink?” Researchers have long ago found out that a better question is “How much does the average person drink?” Alcoholics tend to underreport their own consumption. And by asking the same question a number of different ways, a more accurate profile can be drawn.
I’m not saying that these standardized tests aren’t dumb, just that there may be a reason for some of these seemingly meaningless questions.
I understand your rage. And I understand your worry. But don’t-- you will get work, and you wouldn’t want to work for that company anyway. Inventory Control and Warehousing is a demanding job (both physically and mentally), and turnover can be horrible. If you’ve stuck with it for 16 years, you WILL get hired. Your knowledge of the job will get you promoted.
Spend your downtime learning something job-related that you don’t already know… maybe SAP or Excel or something.
My mom adminsters psychological tests to children. (Yes, she has a lot of great stories.) So she sometimes finds herself having to ask some of these bizarre and pointless questions that y’all report.
For instance, one question is “what would you do if you found a wallet lying on the ground?”
Of course, the “correct” answer is “turn it in to the police” or some such thing.
However, kids these days (especially in the neighbourhoods she works in) are more street-smart than that, and know that if they turn it in they are likely to be blamed for stealing it. So she has started giving credit for “Leave it alone.”
This is why stupid tests like this should be administered by trained professionals, and not by idiots. Sometimes a little discretion is called for.