Personality Tests: All in the Mind?
A good résumé just won’t cut it these days. Employers want more than just skilled and experienced applicants. They want the candidate with just the right fit, which often means the one with the right personality. So it’s little wonder that, as Fast Company reports, personality assessments are “back with a vengeance.”
In November 2004, HRI conducted an Attitude/Personality Assessment Survey and found that nearly six in 10 respondents make hiring decisions based on the personality/attitude of applicants for at least some jobs, with nearly a quarter saying they do this for all jobs. “Anyone who says they don’t is delusional,” writes one respondent.
But that doesn’t mean these companies all use personality tests. In fact, the most common strategy for measuring personality is through structured interviews (41% of those who hire based on personality/attitude), followed by either customized or off-the-shelf tests (34%).
Some respondents to HRI’s survey are skeptical of any sort of formal test, even while acknowledging the importance of personality. “I could not say we actually request information on attitude and/or personality as these are almost impossible to measure in my opinion,” writes one participant. “We do, however, particularly at manager level and above, utilize an extensive interview process (almost overkill) to ensure that everyone is comfortable with the personality of the individual. I have always maintained that we hire people because they are technically qualified and fire them because ‘they don’t fit’ the organization.”
Others believe that formal assessments can be useful if they’re used carefully and appropriately. One HRI respondent states, “Validated off-the-shelf personality instruments are a great addition to test batteries because they often have no adverse impact” but then warns that companies “should use the right instrument for the situation.”
In fact, much of the literature on personality tests agrees that employers should use great care and caution. “Of the 2,500 test publishers out there, only three or four are legitimate,” claims Robert Hogan, editor of Personality Psychology in the Workplace and president of Hogan Assessments Inc. “Most of these people are selling snake oil.”
And even some of the tests with the longest histories are misused. For example, some organizations use the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) for recruitment and selection purposes, although it wasn’t designed for this. “You’ll probably find a lot of people who are tempted to use MBTI for a selection type of process,” said Shawn Bakker, a chartered psychologist at Psychometrics Canada, quoted in Canadian HR Reporter. “But it’s not recommended to use that for personnel selection simply due to the way it works.”
Others argue that personality is just too fluid to measure. There are studies showing, for example, that over half of the people who take the MBTI a second time receive a different score from the first time they took it. And what’s thought of as personality may change according to context. “There’s a tendency to think that everything a person does flows from his personality, but there are experiments that show what predicts behavior is not personality but situation,” says John Darley, a social psychologist at Princeton University.
Former senior editor of Psychology Today Annie Murphy Paul recently published a new book called The Cult of Personality, subtitled How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. “The best predictor of how someone will behave on the job is usually what they’ve done before – their record of achievements and not how they answer a test,” she argues.
Still, some experts and employers swear by personality or psychological testing, claiming that it saves companies both time and money. Bank of America, for example, has reportedly boosted productivity and retention rates through an increased use of assessments in recent years. And Overnight Transportation in Atlanta has reportedly made dramatic cuts in on-the-job delinquency and damage to goods and vehicles by screening candidates through the Hogan Personality Inventory.
Moreover, there are researchers who defend the correlations between personality testing and job performance as being reasonably strong. In one meta-analysis of testing and assessment published in American Psychologist, researchers found that validity coefficients linking assessment center evaluations and job success are as high as for many types of medical tests. Yet even they conclude that “particularly with personality assessment, there is no gold standard that allows psychologists to know a patient with certainty.”
Perhaps, as Darley suggests, behavior is just too dependent on situational factors for anyone’s personality to be pegged accurately. The best assessments might be those that simulate real-life working conditions. Indeed, so-called situational tests have grown more popular in recent years, though “as testing organizations, we need to show that these tests are valid,” according to John Scott of Applied Psychological Techniques. If they are proven valid and cost-effective – and if they don’t have a discriminatory impact on protected groups – such context-laden tests could become a wave of the future in personality assessments.
To read Fast Company’s “Personality Tests: Back with a Vengeance,” go to
http://www.fastcompany.co m/magazine/88/open_playbook.html
To read Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Personality Plus,” go to
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2 004_09_20_a_personality.html
To read Workforce Management’s “Snake Oil or Science,” go to
http://www.workforce.com/sec tion/06/feature/23/85/50/
For more on The Cult of Personality, go to
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04319/411051.stm
To read CFO’s “Casting to Type,” go to
http://www.cfo.com/arti cle.cfm/3014807/1/c_3046615?f=insidecfo
The following sources were used in the writing of this TrendWatcher:
Bates, Steve. “Even Executives Face Drug, Personality Testing.” HR Magazine. ProQuest. July 2003.
Cook, Stephen. “So That’s Your Aptitude?” Management Today. EBSCO. April 2004.
Emmet, Arielle. “Snake Oil or Science? That’s the Raging Debate on Personality Testing.” Workforce Management, October 2004, pp. 90-92.
Frieswick, Kris. “Casting to Type.” CFO, July 2004, pp. 71-72.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Personality Plus.” The New Yorker, September 20, 2004 .
Hsu, Caroline. “The Testing of America .” U.S. News & World Report. ProQuest. September 20, 2004 , p. 68.
Humber, Todd. “Psychometric Testing Often Misused in Recruitment.” Canadian HR Reporter. ProQuest. May 17, 2004 , p. G5.
Meyer, et al. “Psychological Testing and Psychological Assessment: A Review of Evidence and Issues.” American Psychologist, February 2001, pp. 128-165.
Overholt, Alison. “Personality Tests: Back with a Vengeance.” Fast Company, November 2004, pp. 115-117.
Rose, Barbara. “Employers Use Psychological Tests to Match Worker Dispositions to Positions.” Knight Ridder Tribune Business News. ProQuest. October 31, 2004 , p. 1.
Ross, Bentley. “Candidates Face Alternative Testing.” Computer Weekly. EBSCO. November 18, 2003 , p. 54.
“Testing the Patience of a Saint.” Personnel Today. EBSCO. March 2, 2004 , p. 12.
In November 2004, HRI conducted an Attitude/Personality Assessment Survey and found that nearly six in 10 respondents make hiring decisions based on the personality/attitude of applicants for at least some jobs, with nearly a quarter saying they do this for all jobs. “Anyone who says they don’t is delusional,” writes one respondent.
But that doesn’t mean these companies all use personality tests. In fact, the most common strategy for measuring personality is through structured interviews (41% of those who hire based on personality/attitude), followed by either customized or off-the-shelf tests (34%).
Some respondents to HRI’s survey are skeptical of any sort of formal test, even while acknowledging the importance of personality. “I could not say we actually request information on attitude and/or personality as these are almost impossible to measure in my opinion,” writes one participant. “We do, however, particularly at manager level and above, utilize an extensive interview process (almost overkill) to ensure that everyone is comfortable with the personality of the individual. I have always maintained that we hire people because they are technically qualified and fire them because ‘they don’t fit’ the organization.”
Others believe that formal assessments can be useful if they’re used carefully and appropriately. One HRI respondent states, “Validated off-the-shelf personality instruments are a great addition to test batteries because they often have no adverse impact” but then warns that companies “should use the right instrument for the situation.”
In fact, much of the literature on personality tests agrees that employers should use great care and caution. “Of the 2,500 test publishers out there, only three or four are legitimate,” claims Robert Hogan, editor of Personality Psychology in the Workplace and president of Hogan Assessments Inc. “Most of these people are selling snake oil.”
And even some of the tests with the longest histories are misused. For example, some organizations use the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) for recruitment and selection purposes, although it wasn’t designed for this. “You’ll probably find a lot of people who are tempted to use MBTI for a selection type of process,” said Shawn Bakker, a chartered psychologist at Psychometrics Canada, quoted in Canadian HR Reporter. “But it’s not recommended to use that for personnel selection simply due to the way it works.”
Others argue that personality is just too fluid to measure. There are studies showing, for example, that over half of the people who take the MBTI a second time receive a different score from the first time they took it. And what’s thought of as personality may change according to context. “There’s a tendency to think that everything a person does flows from his personality, but there are experiments that show what predicts behavior is not personality but situation,” says John Darley, a social psychologist at Princeton University.
Former senior editor of Psychology Today Annie Murphy Paul recently published a new book called The Cult of Personality, subtitled How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. “The best predictor of how someone will behave on the job is usually what they’ve done before – their record of achievements and not how they answer a test,” she argues.
Still, some experts and employers swear by personality or psychological testing, claiming that it saves companies both time and money. Bank of America, for example, has reportedly boosted productivity and retention rates through an increased use of assessments in recent years. And Overnight Transportation in Atlanta has reportedly made dramatic cuts in on-the-job delinquency and damage to goods and vehicles by screening candidates through the Hogan Personality Inventory.
Moreover, there are researchers who defend the correlations between personality testing and job performance as being reasonably strong. In one meta-analysis of testing and assessment published in American Psychologist, researchers found that validity coefficients linking assessment center evaluations and job success are as high as for many types of medical tests. Yet even they conclude that “particularly with personality assessment, there is no gold standard that allows psychologists to know a patient with certainty.”
Perhaps, as Darley suggests, behavior is just too dependent on situational factors for anyone’s personality to be pegged accurately. The best assessments might be those that simulate real-life working conditions. Indeed, so-called situational tests have grown more popular in recent years, though “as testing organizations, we need to show that these tests are valid,” according to John Scott of Applied Psychological Techniques. If they are proven valid and cost-effective – and if they don’t have a discriminatory impact on protected groups – such context-laden tests could become a wave of the future in personality assessments.
To read Fast Company’s “Personality Tests: Back with a Vengeance,” go to
http://www.fastcompany.co m/magazine/88/open_playbook.html
To read Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Personality Plus,” go to
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2 004_09_20_a_personality.html
To read Workforce Management’s “Snake Oil or Science,” go to
http://www.workforce.com/sec tion/06/feature/23/85/50/
For more on The Cult of Personality, go to
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04319/411051.stm
To read CFO’s “Casting to Type,” go to
http://www.cfo.com/arti cle.cfm/3014807/1/c_3046615?f=insidecfo
The following sources were used in the writing of this TrendWatcher:
Bates, Steve. “Even Executives Face Drug, Personality Testing.” HR Magazine. ProQuest. July 2003.
Cook, Stephen. “So That’s Your Aptitude?” Management Today. EBSCO. April 2004.
Emmet, Arielle. “Snake Oil or Science? That’s the Raging Debate on Personality Testing.” Workforce Management, October 2004, pp. 90-92.
Frieswick, Kris. “Casting to Type.” CFO, July 2004, pp. 71-72.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Personality Plus.” The New Yorker, September 20, 2004 .
Hsu, Caroline. “The Testing of America .” U.S. News & World Report. ProQuest. September 20, 2004 , p. 68.
Humber, Todd. “Psychometric Testing Often Misused in Recruitment.” Canadian HR Reporter. ProQuest. May 17, 2004 , p. G5.
Meyer, et al. “Psychological Testing and Psychological Assessment: A Review of Evidence and Issues.” American Psychologist, February 2001, pp. 128-165.
Overholt, Alison. “Personality Tests: Back with a Vengeance.” Fast Company, November 2004, pp. 115-117.
Rose, Barbara. “Employers Use Psychological Tests to Match Worker Dispositions to Positions.” Knight Ridder Tribune Business News. ProQuest. October 31, 2004 , p. 1.
Ross, Bentley. “Candidates Face Alternative Testing.” Computer Weekly. EBSCO. November 18, 2003 , p. 54.
“Testing the Patience of a Saint.” Personnel Today. EBSCO. March 2, 2004 , p. 12.