In the burgeoning market of assessments, HR professionals who are being marketed to on all fronts must first gain command of the lingo. A behavior test measures factors that are observable—such as verbal ability or reaction times, says Alexander Swan , assistant professor of psychology at Eureka College in Eureka, Ill.
We can measure the level of extroversion through a personality assessment. So, for a position that requires some detailed work, discounting her from the candidate pool based solely on an assessment would be an error. For example, job candidates could be asked to describe a time they felt overwhelmed by work. What steps did they take to prioritize or make sure nothing slipped through the cracks?
As an HR department of one, Scher opted for the Harrison Assessment, a customized test that measures 12 different behavior pairs such as self-confidence and consideration for others through questions that take about 25 minutes to answer. Rather, she compares results for individual candidates against the personality and behavior targets for specific roles—and factors in responses candidates gave during interviews—before making any hiring recommendations.
While some argue that such assessments can reduce hiring bias, federal regulators say they can have a discriminatory effect. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EEOC to stop using their personality assessments after investigations found they likely adversely impacted applicants based on race and national origin. For an assessment to be safely implemented as a hiring tool, it must be statistically validated—or a company leaves itself vulnerable to unintentional bias, Crotty says.
If the test has a disparate impact—disproportionately screening out a certain type of person—the employer has to be able to justify its use on the basis of business necessity. Gerhold cautions against rushing into selecting a vendor. In addition to asking whether the assessment has been validated, HR professionals also should ask by who and on which populations. The Hogan Personality Inventory Assessment is just one better-known example.
For a study published in Personnel Psychology, Deniz Ones, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, pooled hundreds of studies that looked at personality assessments and bias. Overall, her research shows, there were no consistent race and ethnicity differences on these measures.
A strong—and fair—test takes both psychological and psychometric expertise to develop, and the process to develop and refine the test can often take several years, she says. Bias vulnerability can originate outside of the assessment tool as well.
And while that might not affect one particular class of candidates, it means culling the candidate pool unnecessarily—leaving perhaps the best potential hires on the sidelines. Andrus at Seraphic Group uses the Behavioral Strategies Assessment, which includes a questionnaire, an essay, a two-hour validation session, and a debriefing with the hiring manager and HR professional.
When interpreting behavior scores, she tries to keep a recent experience top of mind. What research does the assessment draw on? The Five-Factor Model looks at openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
How will the results be interpreted? How are the results validated? Gerhold recently helped a large hardware store chain do just that, by asking its top employees to take a personality assessment and have managers give independent performance ratings.
It just means that personality tests can only tell you what you tell it. At best, Vazire says you could use it as a comparative tool that can tell you how you rank on extroversion compared with others who have taken the same test.
There have been studies that show certain Big 5 factor scores correlate with certain outcomes—conscientiousness correlates with longer life, for instance, and extroversion correlates with higher sales for sales reps. Correlations are just that; they could be incidental. But commercial personality assessments seem to depend heavily on such correlations. For example, one assessment from The Predictive Index, a company that measures behavioral characteristics and matches personality profiles to jobs, views such correlations in their own studies as a measure of success.
Sometimes commercial personality tests ask odd questions—like, Do you identify with snakes? Those kinds of conclusions venture into the pseudoscientific, Stein says. There are other reasons why Stein thinks some personality assessments may be pseudoscientific.
Without that, Stein says personality tests should be treated with extreme suspicion. Some companies like The Predictive Index say their product meets such standards. Two Index representatives, Greg Barnett and Austin Fossey, also say predictions based on their methods are accurate. It is because we are all judges of character, and we often do well at intuiting whom to date or hire and who we are, Vazire says.
Personality, she says, is just not that mysterious. Already a subscriber? Certainly, the most popular and widespread personality test is the Myers-Briggs Traits Indicator or MBTI for short, which is believed to be able to accurately measure your personality by putting you into different categories.
The test became so popular that for many years it was considered to be so accurate that it could even tell what kind of a career a person might be most suitable for and so on. How the MBTI test works is it assess the person taking the test by answering questions based on 4 different traits and their counterparts which gives a total of 8 traits and, when combined make up 16 different types of personality.
For the purpose of this article, I did the test myself on 16personalities. Psychologists want their measurements to be reliable, and there are two types of reliability :. So, as it turns out, the most popular personality test has major flaws, but where does that leave other similar personality tests, or do you even need personality tests to understand things about yourself and others.
Whichever floats your boat get it? Because even if that was to happen, the constant monitoring of a psychologist will surely have an influence on your personality in one way or another, mainly because our mind is susceptible to social interference. Third and this is the most compelling reason if you ask me, is that people change and the person you are now and your traits might alter significantly in the future.
If you think of it this way, who could better determine who you are than you, yourself? And once this question is asked, another one pops-up right away — do we even need personality tests? Instead of spending your time on these tests, you could actually be doing the things you want and like to do, the things that really define who you are.
Right there and then I discovered something which we all do for the time to time, and that is self-reflection. The origins of introspection theory can be traced back to Wilhelm Wundt, and he gave specific instructions on how to properly self-reflect such as:. As you can see, these instructions feel a little rough and hard to follow, and this is mainly because Wundt wanted to make a synthesis of the conscious experiences a person who is self-reflecting could feel.
What Titchener had in mind was that instead of self-reflecting on our whole life basically, we should focus on the individual components that make up our conscious experiences.
What all this means is that self-reflection is a real thing and we can use it to find out more about ourselves, so instead of answering the questions on a personality test, we should try and ask ourselves the questions we want to answer. E-mail is already registered on the site. Please use the Login form or enter another. You entered an incorrect username or password.
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