Behavioral Interviews for New Hires?

banetbi asks: "I am a PHP developer and FreeBSD administrator, and have been looking for a new job for a couple of months. Finally, I got a call back from a company, but they want me to take an on-line questionnaire before I come in for an interview. After doing some research I found the company that makes the test and checked out their website. It looks like this is some sort of personality test (they call it an artificially intelligent behavioral analysis). What does my personality have to do with my ability to perform in a job? Have any of you had to take a personality test to get a job? Should I do it, or just keep looking?"

It tells you about their culture

[qwijibo]

The personality test tells you something about the company. Someone in a position of influence in HR got that instituted as a policy. I've only had one formal test like that. It was the only job I ever interviewed for that I didn't get. I'm making twice what they paid in the first job I got after interviewing there, so it appears to have worked out ok. All of my other employers have been happy with me as a person and employee, so I don't know what the personality tests tell someone.

I primarily do system administration and development centric jobs. The thing that's interesting about the personality tests I had experience with in psychology class and my mom's masters thesis is that they do a decent job of rating specific traits, but it's not clear what any of those traits mean.

For example, I find myself having frequent personality shifts. When I'm asking our senior management about their business needs, I'm a follower. When I'm telling them about technical solutions, I'm a leader. I tell them no and correct their assumptions. They seem to like that I can be an expert in some things without being an arrogant prick in things I know less about. I enjoy working with people like that as well.

How a personality test would help is beyond me. In most cases, it's beyond the HR people too. Technical people are black and white for me. They can either do what they claim they can do or they can't. The computer will be the one to decide if their solution works, so it's pretty easy to evaluate them. The HR people live in a world that is all one shade of grey. Whether or not their personality test is helpful or detrimental can't be determined. If they apply it uniformly, the ones who would have been great employees but fail the test will be working somewhere else, so you don't know that. Likewise, if it gets rid of the people who are one TPS report cover sheet away from going postal, you won't know because it will just be some workplace shooting on the other side of town for all you know.

Every company has weird little things that don't make any sense. If you otherwise like the company, jump through their stupid hoops and see how it goes. If you wouldn't be inclined to work for them even if offerred the job, tell them that you find personality tests to be demeaning and are no longer interested in the position. If you think it's worth posting on ask slashdot, I'm thinking you're already disinclined to do it. Why not give them negative feedback in the process.

Re:Your personality is tested *regardless*...

[disappear]

he expressed the opinion that the best way to get a raise was to jump from job to job

Now, mentioning that while interviewing is in bad taste, but it's actually pretty [informationweek.com] well [careerjournal.com] established [techwr-l.com] that job-hopping increases salaries. (Yes, those reports are essentially anecdotal; I'm unable to find the survey that report similar results right at the moment, but I recall that they're out there.

Re:I had one of those ...

[kjs3]

Thanks! That's the first laugh-out-loud thing I've read today.

The answer coming from both sides

[quietwalker]

I think that several people posting simply don't have the right concept about what's going on. This isn't a behavior or social ability test, to see how you can cope with a situation. Rather, as a select few individuals have indicated, this is a measure of your personality type.

For example;

• Are you extroverted or introverted
• Are you more likely to focus on detail and move slowly or focus on results and willing to take a risk.
• Are you motivated by a challenge, or by money.

Additionally, certain tests include a quality indicator. Answering questions like, "Have you ever lied?" with a "no" sets off an alarm that the person may be falsifiying information.

I've worked with an industrial psychologist who generates these exact tests, and helped them provide web-enabled interfaces for it. I've implemented the scoring and ran through the tests as they've changed many times. I'm not going to comment on whether they're accurate or not - it's irrelevant to the people here.

Instead, lets look at how they are used - something that I've also been exposed to, both from the usage of the tools I wrote, to being subjected to similiar tests by potential employers.

1. HR requirement as a filter.

   These tools are meant to check you into usually four to eight personality types. If you do not fit the type, you do not get the job, for any company who uses them.

   Real world examples I've seen include:

   • Programmer: Attention to detail, motivated by sense of accomplishment, lack of ambition.
   • Manager : focus on completion/results over detail, motivated by power/control, high career ambition
   • Salesman: focus on people, motivated by money & recoginition, optimistic
2. 'Smart' usage

   Instead of randomly specifying a category, your existing employees are profiled, and you take the results of your star employees and make those the expected attributes for the position.

3. Contract jobs

   Many contracting firms expect a contractor to take a behavioral assessment, which is used as a tool by the contract manager to; provide a good match for a candidate, ensure the candidate and company needs match, and to provide humanistic value for an individual they have to represent. You can't easily say "Such-and-Such is trustworthy," having only met them once, but you can point to a psych evaluation and say "Our analysis shows that s/he places a high emphasis on trust."

So, what do you do with this info if you're a tech-savvy guy applying for an IT-related position?

These tests work as filters for, well, non-skilled positions. They are applied to every new hire, usually per company HR policy. Honestly, they don't appear to work very well for skilled labour. Look at the programmer example up above. The profile given is for a programmer who is sedate. No new languages, no new technologies, happy to be doing the same job for the next 20 years. This was just the result of a random decision; you had to pick one of the 8 categories, and the one with 'attention to detail' was the top pick. What happens when technologies change, or the software needs to be updated, or new software designed? Too bad you hired someone who won't tend to learn new things.

What they say they want, and what they need are often disparate things. You can be perfectly suited for the job, but dinged on the somewhat arbitrairy match from the personality test.

To answer my question above, the smart IT person will attempt to determine before hand what the employer is looking for and cheat the test.

These tests are transparent. If something asks if you'd rather have a trophy with your name on it, or a cash prize, you can tell one is focused on recognition, and the other on money. Figure out beforehand what the profile is they're looking for and try to match it. Be consistent, since the same question will be asked 3-4 times using different wording. Most scoring systems ar