When I was last looking for a job 10 years ago everywhere I applied to (Wal-Mart, Target, CVS, McDonald’s) all made me take an online test that was 100s of questions that were literally all personality based. Stuff like “When you go out with friends you are the most social of the group” with answers being Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree and strongly Disagree. And all the questions were just based off social interactions not anything based off what the job entailed, and it looked like all the retail places used the exact same questions or format.
So do jobs still do this, and why so many questions about social behavior? I always heard to just put “Strongly Agree” on any of the pro- social behavior questions anyway to cheat the system.
These tests always prominently say that there are no right or wrong answers. What that actually means, of course, is that there are right and wrong answers, and the HR department just isn’t telling you what they are (and they might differ from one HR department to another). The purpose is to have something that can be scored by a computer, to decrease the large number of applications that an actual human has to look at.
They certainly use them as a sorting algorithm. In theory, they are used to make sure that the person has the personality traits for the particular job they are applying for. So some questions might distinguish between creative types and structured analyst types. You want the first type in your marketing department and the second type in your audit department. No right or wrong answers, unless you only applied to one of those jobs.
They also ask questions in slightly different ways to see of they get different answers that would disqualify almost anyone. “Have you ever stolen anything from your employer?” versus “Did you ever intentionally take something from work, like a pen or stapler?” The person who answers yes to the latter isn’t being scrupulously honest unless he or she also answered yes to the first. You can quibble about how in some carefully considered personal circumstance, those seemingly inconsistent answers can be reconciled but the answer “yes” to either of those on the test means you are a thief. A “yes” answer to only the latter question also means you lied on the first one and that you didn’t think stealing a pen was a big deal.
Or it could mean that you only took things you were allowed to take, not things you weren’t allowed to take. A lot of businesses have a big supply of branded pens that they want people to take, because it gets their name out there. And sometimes those questions extend as far as paperclips or staples.
Or they told us to take home office supplies when we all went home due to the covid lockdown. I took home a bunch of stuff with my employer’s blessing. Heck, the admin ordered more office supplies to be delivered to my home.
All I know is that they can be very counterproductive; some years back, a former supervisor gave me a call and told me his team had an opening, and that he’d like me to apply for it. In fact, he said that I basically had the job if I made it through the HR process.
Which sounded weird at the time but I figured whatever, Mike’s just saying that in case something weird happens.
Nope… part of the HR process was that they administer some goofy personality test that asked a bunch of questions about how likely you were to make decisions without going up the chain of command and how autonomous of a worker you are, etc…
Apparently I failed it; too autonomous and likely to make my own decisions/not involve my boss unless absolutely necessary. What’s funnier is that I had a co-worker who had also been asked to apply for the same position after I did, and he failed it too. As it turns out, the sort of worker Mike likes (autonomous, able to think for ourselves and solve problems) is not the sort his company’s HR likes to hire. I found this out because when my co-worker had followed up, Mike apparently vented his spleen a bit about the hiring process and how it basically weeds out the exact people he wants to hire, every single time he tries to hire someone.
I think for lower-level retail jobs, they’re trying to get a handle on how casually crooked/lazy you may be, and/or weed out the obviously stupid or unobservant people who would answer “Yes” to “Have you ever stolen something worth more than $100 from an employer?” .
I feel like I have some insight into this subject. I was recently hired to a position and did various testing including a personality profile. The cool thing is that I got the test results back later on, as did the rest of the people hired at the same time.
Essentially the questionnaire was looking for how well I fit with the “core competencies” that had been identified for the role. These competencies included things like “Act Safely”, “Collaborate”, and “Communicate Effectively”. The results show how well you align with the competencies (low/moderate/high) and provides a summary of strengths and “Challenges & Derailers”. My strengths included things like “Very much more relaxed than most people and likely to feel calm during times of change”. Challenges and derailers had things like “Likely to be more driven by work-life balances rather than achieving challenging objectives”.
There was also a bit where it assessed how you approached the questionnaire itself, so my rating spread, self-presentation, and profile spread was all assessed as being typical.
I think the key to these things is not to overthink it. It’s actually pretty normal to give a slightly different answer to a slightly different question. Have you ever stolen from work? No. Have you ever taken some pens home from work? Yes. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of answer sequence, don’t try to overanalyse previous answers and make them all “match”.
There are no wrong answers, only wrong people. Notice that my strengths and challenges examples I gave could easily have been reversed for a different job profile. Being super relaxed isn’t a good or bad thing, it is a just a thing that suits some jobs and not others. Being work-life balance focussed is not a good or bad thing, it’s just a thing that doesn’t suit some jobs. If I were to try and fake being super motivated by challenges and prioritising work over life I could end up being in a job that is a very poor fit for me.
All that said, my cohorts and I all shared our results with each other and some of us had some pretty serious “potential derailers”, but we all did quite well in the other tests which involved error checking, verbal reasoning etc. My impression is that HR were putting more emphasis into skills rather than personality and probably put a lot of stock into the CV itself.
It is a great way for a hiring dept. to not take responsibility if a new hire goes wrong. They can blame the test that upper management tells them to use.
Apparently, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (R) test is a popular one. It measures people on four separate all-or-nothing binary scales, thus pigeonholing everybody into one of 16 personality types – only barely more resolution than the better-known 12-category horoscope.
“Human Resource” departments are fond of pseudo-scientific quackery like this because it just makes their job easy, if meaningless. The purveyors of the MBTI make money selling the test.
(Well, how about that. Discourse doesn’t auto-convert (R) to the circled-R symbol now?)
The Skepdic article describes MBTI as being largely based on personality obsercations made by Carl Jung, based on Jung’s anecdotal observations and not at all on scientific studies or any statistical analysis. It appears to be pure pseudo-scientific woo.
Taco Bell had these. We took it one day when it was slow and hilariously we all failed spectacularly when we all answered honestly - we exited before it could be formally registered.
According to a Society of Human Resource Management survey back in 2014, only about 22% of employers use a personality test to assess a candidate. But that survey is a bit flawed as it was limited to members of SHRM and there were less than 400 participants. I know I haven’t been given a personality test as part of the application process since Bill Clinton was in office. I thought those tests were bullshit when I had to take them and I’m glad my employer doesn’t use it now.
It’s not always HR who demands pointless test. At my company, managers used to have a habit of adding all sorts of assessments to the job requisition in order to weed out candidates. I’d explain to them that we couldn’t use the results of these assessments as the sole reason to weed a candidate out but later I’d hear, “This person scored low on the logic test. I don’t want to talk to them.” Thankfully we revamped our assessments and managers no longer have an option to add those pointless tests.
The point is businesses think tests regarding personality type and other things offer significant insights into who will be a good worker or manager. They often do not, even when answered honestly, which they often are not in a business setting. Well over 80% of top companies use them.
I think a key point of the OP is using these types of tests for entry level jobs. As an HR professional, I can see the argument for using these types of tests to construct a professional/managerial team with a variety of desired traits and competencies. But for staffing a McDonald’s? Sure, you need some way to weed out the total slugs and thieves, but otherwise IMHO it’s a bunch of wankery.
I read something like 420 of Fortune 500 companies use them. I doubt this is just for entry level jobs. I think it is sometimes because they seem academic, can be easily scored and given too much credence, are doing something to justify time which may be better than the alternatives.
Some questions about minor misdeeds practically everybody commits (asking if you’ve ever taken small office supplies, goofed off when you were supposed to be working, etc) might also be intended to determine whether the applicant gives the honest answer or the “right” one.
“Everyone knows these tests are meaningless, we just want to see if you can take orders.”
Reminds me of a story about a convention of those who liked the TV series “The Prisoner”. In one of the sessions, the moderator asked everyone to sit down and take a test with a few questions. Which everyone in the room did. The moderator then pointed out that this was antithetical to their supposed admiration of the main character in the series.
The test defines how pathetically desperate one is to get a job. Any job.
Anyone that would sit through and respond such a load of asinine questions is indeed desperate enough that once employed will most likely be a candidate to be molded into whatever sniveling lackey the corporation wishes you to become. Note that outfits that produce this sort of material will almost always be defined as ‘corporations’, not merely just a ‘company’.
The correct answer to this sort of questionnaire is; ‘I still have enough dignity that I’d rather be homeless than respond to such juvenile bullshit as this.’
Furthermore, those that have nothing better to do than to design such questionnaires need to get a life. And a job — a real one whereby they actually accomplish something productive.
I use Indeed for recruiting, and they have an enormous number of different tests that I could send to potential candidates. Some of them seem useful, like “Reliability”, which is supposed to determine how good they are at attendance.
I’ve seen no relation between how well a candidate scored on that test and how well they were actually able to show up to work.
I’ve taken a number of these tests in my employment history, and I always use the philosophy of answering it from the perspective of the person that they want to hire, not necessarily your own. It’s not a matter of how you act, but whether you know how to act appropriately. Your employer is paying you, and they are not just paying you for your time, but for your cooperation in helping the business you work for to be successful.