Exactly! It’s a line of thinking that cost me a couple of jobs, albeit indirectly. I reached the point where I said enough is enough and started my own business and have operated for 15 years. Pretty much retired now.
Interestingly, before I opened up I took a little business course and of the 15 or so in the course just over half had a history of being fired. The reason? They had ideas and opinions of their own and were prepared to back them up. That sort of thinking doesn’t generally sit well with a boss who could could already be inexperienced & insecure.
On the other hand; if one is just entering the job market, has little experience, or is in an unskilled line of work, well, sometimes you just have to suck it up.
Makes sense. I’ve only been fired from one job, but there are a few others that I probably would have if I hadn’t quit first. Some people just aren’t all that well suited to working for others.
When I was hiring people I paid little attention to anything on the application other than to ensure they filled out their contact information and depending on the position, what kind of experience they had. I could care less about any university they may have attended. I could generally tell within 5 minutes if that person was going to be a fit. There would typically be a trial period anyway. Most of the time things worked out.
Right on! My work experience was that when I was young I was eager to please and learn and do as I was asked etc. The more experienced I became the more confident I became. Then it reaches a point where you might have someone telling you to do something in some way that you know doesn’t work or is just plain stupid.
That’s when the problems start! heh,heh,heh.
My interviews are basically in reverse. I tell them about the job, and let them decide if they think that they are a good fit for it.
I probably get a better read on them based on their Anime preferences than on any of the skill assessments that Indeed has to offer.
The time I got fired was over the stupidest thing. We had a dish that called for 8 ounces of shrimp. My GM told me to put 6 shrimp in the bag. I said, so we are going by count rather than weight. She said that 6 shrimp was 8 ounces, I put a bag on the scale to show that it was a bit under 7. I told her that I would follow her directions to put 6 shrimp in the bag, but I wouldn’t agree with her that 6 shrimp was 8 ounces. She didn’t much like that I was questioning her authority, so she had her AGM fire me while she hid in the office. Place closed a couple months later.
When I was in high school (1980), I applied for a job at a record store chain called The Wherehouse. I was warned by employees and other applicants that there would be a test (called the London Test, I think). They told me that to pass I had to admit stealing in the past, to prove I was honest. I guess it was assumed everybody has stolen something at least once. I could’t bring myself to mark yes for that question and I was not brought back for an interview.
Yeah, it always amazes me that the concept of “hire for attitude, train for skill” has been around for more than 30 years, but HR departments and hiring people consistently fixate on people’s CV/resume and the skills/projects people have worked on, instead of personality traits that
And they frequently hire people who are misanthropic, sociopathic, inflexible, extremely narrowly focused in a professional sense, and so on, because they were dazzled by skills or experiences on resumes, and didn’t actually evaluate “Is this a person I’d like to work with?” or “Is this a person who’s likely to grow into more responsibility?” or even “Is this person able to learn and adapt?”
I tend to think that these tests are a way for many companies to try to attempt to do some of that in an automated fashion without actually being willing to do the work of identifying if prospective employees are good fits for their workplaces and teams.
Yeah, pretty much this. HR departments make up all kinds of useless bullshit, mostly to disguise the fact (even from themselves) that their primary function is to prevent employees from suing their employers, or from winning a lawsuit should they sue.
My company does this thing every year where there are all kinds of morale-building, camaraderie-encouraging events for a couple of days. It’s the high point of the year for the HR department. Part of it is some bullshit personality test where we’re assigned four colors in a certain order based on some kind of nonsense personality test apparently designed by a college psych major. A freshman psych major. We’re actually encouraged to put our color results on our firm (internal) facebook page.
I’m in the IT department, and (quite stereotypically) plenty of people in my department get, shall we say, atypical results. One guy actually did blow up and walk out, saying “this makes me sound like a serial killer, and it’s bullshit!” He was, of course, right, but he was retiring in a few months anyway and could do pretty much anything he wanted.
So I did the stupid color nonsense, and the cooperative puzzle-solving stuff,* and all that. But I’m not putting my colors on the facebook page.
* Also, it’s not really fair to make the IT drones solve math and logic puzzles cooperatively with, say, the marketing/business development people, because the IT people are just going to get really impatient with them and just be even more convinced that it’s all bullshit.
When I applied in 1985 for a job that required a security clearance, one of the tests was the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). First published around 1940, it was updated a few years later to remove references to things like “Drop the Handkerchief” (an archaic name for a variant of “Duck Duck Goose”).
The test consisted of hundreds of true-false questions, and the alloted time was way too short to finish all of them, which seemed designed to make test takers answer quickly.
Later, I learned (in one of Bill Poundstone’s “Big Secrets” books) that the MMPI was designed to detect a number of psychological conditions. Some of these seemed reasonable: repeated questions asked about hearing voices, along with other traits related to schizophrenia. In racing through the questions, a person trying to hide their condition might answer ‘correctly’ 10 out of 11 times, but the one ‘incorrect’ answer would elicit a post-test interview.
Other detection approaches seemed silly (especially 35 years later). Regulations at the time banned homosexuals from receiving security clearances, and this test contained some seemingly innocuous questions designed to find closeted gays, based on now-ridiculous-sounding theories. One example: the ‘correct’ response to the question “I would enjoy the work of a forest ranger” was “true”–for a male. A female answering “true” would be considered a potential sign of homosexuality, and interviewed afterward. Conversely the ‘correct’ response to “I enjoy the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’” was “false” for males, and “true” for females. Since AiW is a popular book among mathematicians (its author was one) and this employer hired lots of mathematicians, the MMPI undoubtedly caused plenty of problems in hiring.
But I see that’s it’s still around, and can be taken online. Here’s hoping it’s better than the version I took in 1985.
For a retro view, try reading William H Whyte’s classic, The Organization Man, written in the 1950s. They were using psychological profiling back then, and probably earlier as well.
I like personality tests for fun, but hate them as an employer screening tool. For fun, they tell me things I might not know. Employers seem to be looking for compliant sheep.
I’ve never had a problem understanding the kinds of answers they are looking for. For example, “When you go out with friends you are the most social of the group." Some people might think, “I want to appear friendly!” So, they check, “strongly agree”, which is probably a mistake because that suggests you might very well be too talkative and too much of a time wasting distraction in your work place. I would check, “neutral”, instead.
Some bosses/owners want employees to lie about the dumbest things. One thing I learned working for others is at some point the customer will realize they’ve been taken advantage of. It could take 10 years but at some point the penny will drop.
I strived not to lie when I started my own company. Even when people almost beg you to lie. A good example is delivery dates. They will need something by a certain time and insist you meet that deadline even when it’s impossible. Most times they’re fudging the time they need things by, but that’s another thread.
I would at some point tell them; “Sure I can tell you this will be delivered at that time, but don’t came to me when it isn’t, because it won’t be. But if that’s what you want to hear . . .”
They might go elsewhere. At some point they will understand I was being honest. But they make a liar out of you.
Employment-based personality tests are garbage.
But if you want to know what they’re sorting for, they want employees who are compliant, honest, agreeable, and have a good work ethic. They want people who are friendly and sociable, but not to the point that they’ll be prone to any sort of bonding or gossip that might distract from work and lead to employee solidarity.
They really, really do not want people gossiping about management, or work conditions. That leads to unionization, which of course can’t be allowed.
Oh, yes. Even within a company.
At my mega-law firm (over 2,500 lawyers), we in IT are pushed all the time by lawyers to agree to ridiculous, unachievable delivery times for various projects. And, being lawyers, once they’ve got you on record as agreeing (after bullying you into such agreement), they’ll hold you to it.
Fortunately, we know that if we stick together about realistic delivery times, we really can’t be bullied. And we have some good managers who will back us up.
And that’s better. It doesn’t help anyone, not us, not the lawyers, to agree to unrealistic delivery times. Everyone ends up unhappy.
And what happens, at less ethical, more dishonest firms than the one that employs me, is that employees end up doing the work on the sly, after hours, unbilled and unpaid,* because the consequences of not meeting a bullshit deadline are severe.
* Such employees are, as a rule, non-exempt, and cannot be compelled to work off the clock, uncompensated. And yet they are, all the time.
Fortune 500 companies are not naive and use these tests for certain reasons and purposes, not all silly. Sure, the tests may be given too much time and credence. But there is a lot of research into validity for some of them. There is little reason to doubt they are probably good at detecting some things, are mediocre or bad at seeing other things. The researchers know there is a significant share of false negatives and positives. The published articles are careful to show limitations. The HR manager might ignore the caveats, researched population or warnings and assume these tests say more than they might do.
Another example but in an entirely different industry is construction. This is one of the reason workmanship can be so shoddy. The higher ups — many of whom have never done the job in their lives — dictate that jobs be completed within a certain time frame. Often such time frames don’t take into account the hickups that can happen along the way. The tradesperson cuts corners to get the job done and save his job. The result being the person that buys the property suffers for it down the road at some point. Either that or the purchaser notices the shoddy workmanship and has it redone. Which brings about the old adage; ‘Not enough time to do it right but plenty of time to do it over.’
Strangely I’ve been employed for over 40 years and have never worked for a company that used these things.
When one HR manager assumes that the guy who says “no” to “have you ever stolen anything” is a liar, and thus not a good employee, and another HR manager assumes that the guy who says “yes” is a thief, and thus not a good employee, at least one of them is doing it wrong. Most likely, both.
It occurs to me that it wouldn’t take much to convince the HR profession to revive phrenology. 
Go apply to work in a call center–I guaran-fuckin’-TEE you will be assaulted with a barrage of bullshit tests. The only useful ones are the typing test and the basic math test, the rest are arrant nonsense and a total waste of time.
Sometimes the applicant gets a chance to fire back though–I was applying at a very large cable company for a call center job and during the interview I was asked about the email address on my CV, which is basically my username here @ ISP. I told them I also had another email address that’s firstname.lastname @ ISP but I never check it because I don’t really use it much. So they asked didn’t I run a risk of not getting a job by putting my slightly cheeky email address up front and center, and I replied that any workplace so humorless that it would take exception to my email address name is very likely not a good fit for me anyway so I’d rather know that up front. Yeah, they hired me.