You Who?

Dissed By A Robot

Here’s an excerpt from a jobs forum on Indeed.com:

“Anyone else had trouble getting past the 3rd party online assessment ADP forces you to take? I am in sales now, though of a different kind and one of the top salespeople in my company. I worked previously with a manager at ADP and he wanted to bring me onto his team but the assessment I took put me outside the "range" for that particular job. The recruiter told me it was a no go and that ADP would not consider me for this position. Couldn't believe it!!! Then the recruiter had no information about what the test meant, what the report showed, what sales job the profile would fit, anything! Just said well its a 3rd party system and we just go by what it says. Does this happen often?”

Unfortunately, the answer is “All too often.” Job applicants at a major retailer and a national chain of steak houses also report being told they were disqualified by “the test” or “the computer” with no explanation and no opportunity to make their own case. This is the rankest abuse of such tests. It demotivates job seekers and that demotivation spreads virally, as in the above post. Even those who are hired begin their time on the payroll with the darkest suspicions about management.

At MRA we work very hard to communicate two things to companies using the MRA Leadership Matrix:

1. The test will identify high and low potential candidates, but no decision should ever be made on test results alone. Resume, references, educational background and interviews should all be considered. Even if the test indicates low potential, there might be compelling reasons to hire anyway.  Consider a sales job where the test shows limited potential for selling, but the individual is a well-known retired professional athlete. Might be a good hire.
2. If the hiring process gets to the interview stage, the test results should be shared with the candidate and the candidate should have the chance to stipulate the accuracy. Over tens-of-thousands of tests,  job candidates have said the MRA Leadership Matrix reports were 92% accurate. In those very rare cases where the subjects says, “No, that’s not me at all”,  we advise the hiring manager to discard the results and take the report out of the process.

Let’s hope that most HR folks will proceed both humanely and ethically.

-=John Loven

How Bad Can it Get?

Last week, I was talking to a woman who was applying for a $40k job as an administrative assistant to the president of a non-profit. They subjected her to a six-hour battery of tests.  She felt put upon and abused. She said, “For a six-figure job, I’d go to a proctologist if they asked me, but this is ridiculous.”

Reading the job boards, I see some weird, sad, and funny stories about crazy personality tests, crazy interviewers who don’t understand the tests, and job applicants who feel they have been transported to Kafka Land. This is a place to tell your story and get some feedback from HR professionals who actually know what’s going on. You might even get some sympathy <G>.

-= John Loven

'We have something for everyone.' -- P.T. Barnum

Some readers of our first post added some long, thoughtful and often angry commentaries. One main source of anger: employers giving 'personality tests' that seemed frivolous and/or irrelevant to the job. Readers reported tests asking about one's favorite color, how you cross your legs and what kind of animal you'd like to be. Why are such tests out there? Why are they popular? The answer is something called the Forer effect.

The Forer (or Barnum) effect is also known as the subjective validation effect or the personal validation effect.The expression, "the Barnum effect," seems to have originated with psychologist Paul Meehl, in deference to circus man P.T. Barnum's reputation as a master psychological manipulator. Psychologist B.R. Forer found that people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone.

Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student a copy of a page that he had randomly selected from a horoscope book. He asked them to rate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with '5' meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an 'excellent' assessment and '4' meaning the assessment was 'good.' The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of times with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2. In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character. His accuracy amazed his subjects, though his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign.

How can you tell whether a personality profile is a P.T Barnum trick or a genuine psychometric instrument? Here's the test:

Imagine that you have a group of 12 people, each born on a different day in a different month. You then write each person's birthday on a piece of opaque paper and lay the 12 sheets on paper on a table face down. What are the chances that an individual can go to the table and pick the sheet with their own birthday on it? The answer is one in twelve, or 8.3 percent of the time. If you turn the papers right side up, people will pick their own birthday 100 percent of the time. Something which genuinely differentiates individuals should be selected more often than chance dictates. If you obtain horoscopes based on the 12 individuals' birth dates and put them face up around the table, the chances of the right one being selected are about the same as chance.

Now let's think about the kind of information a business would like to have about a prospective employee: his or her behavioral traits in the workplace. If you have a group of 12 people who have been reliably observed to have strongly different behavioral styles and give them one of the 'parlor game' personality tests, the chances of picking out their own report will be (as you would expect) nearly chance. A genuinely scientific test, however, will make assertions that will not apply to everyone in the world and the chances of picking one's own report out of twelve differing reports will be far above chance.

In other posts, we'll look at the science behind some of the tests that do give valuable and accurate results. If you want to ask questions in advance, post them as comments to this article. Or share experiences you may have had with either very powerful tests, or very dumb tests.

-=John Loven

Why We're Here

The College Journal of the Wall Street Journal (8/7/2006) says “More Employers Give Personality Tests”. A recent article by staff reporter Virginia Knight includes interviews with employers, from a small financial advisor up to H&R Block, who feel that personality testing is an important part of their hiring process. The article goes on to say:

“Financial advisory firms big and small are using psychometric assessments, personality profiling and intelligence tests to hire staff, coach employees and create teams. When used well, the tests, which are relatively inexpensive -- Mr. Rousso (a certified financial planner with a practice in Ventura, Ca.) says he spent around $300 per candidate, including consultancy fees -- can cut costs and improve performance. However, advisory firms risk lawsuits if they fail to do due diligence as there are a plethora of tests available and the industry is unregulated.”

What does all this mean to you as a job seeker? Being in the Wall Street Journal, the article quoted looks at the financial industry, but personality profiling is used in every industry. It is only rarely used for hourly workers, but for every level of salaried manager, sales person or customer service rep, the use of personality tests is increasingly common. A Google search on “personality profiling” will show you in a nanosecond that, as the article says, the industry is unregulated. There are free tests that involve your favorite colors and $360 tests that require a trained psychologist to explain the results to you. There are tests that purport to explain your deepest inner processes, and tests that simply claim to measure whether you like to meet strangers at trade shows. It’s a zoo.

This blog will take a look at how the most commonly used tests were developed and how employers look at your results. We’ll discuss their legality, their ethical use and what you, the job seeker, can do to use your results to your advantage in the search and interview process. For starters, here’s a list of guidelines that most employers ought to use in selecting and applying personality tests.

• Assume that every person is valuable and capable of success.

• Profile reports should always be positive in tone.

• Reports should always be shared with the subject if the process reaches the interview stage.

• Reports should not be shared with others without the subject’s approval.

• The subject should always have a chance to stipulate the accuracy – or inaccuracy - of the report.

• Profile results should only be used in combination with interviews and other measures or assessments. They should never – legally or ethically – be the sole basis of a hiring decision.

-=John Loven