I can certainly sympathize with people who have been subjected to a poorly thought out hiring process - whether it involves a person or a test asking questions which seem unhelpful to the process of making a match between employee and employer.

I own a small IT firm and in the past 10 years I have hired perhaps 40 people and interviewed hundreds. I try hard to be a good guy and part of that is hiring people who will be a good fit for our firm. Making bad hiring decisions is very painful - for me, for the other people who work here, for our customers and for the employee who is more than likely not enjoying himself. And you know, in our type of consulting, where everyone knows lots of passwords to lots of firms, you can lose some sleep over wanting to let go someone who might have bad feelings over the matter. Its important to get the decision to hire right in the first place for everyone concerned.

I have some pretty smart and experienced guys as coaches, guys who have built and run businesses with hundreds of employees - whose counsel I respect. And one day when I had had a particularly painful experience with someone who was not working out, I asked one of these guys "what did you learn in your 40 years about hiring". And they pointed me to one of these firms. And you know, believe it or not, the good firms out there(we use Caliper) can pretty much do what they say. While its by no means the only criteria, our experience has shown that the insight from these profiles can provide useful input to the hiring decision. I should add that I am a research engineer by training - and so I had historically approached these things from a perspective of extreme skepticism. Further, I would not stand up and count myself as a very good reader of other people - I mean after all, there's a reason I'm an engineer instead of a social worker or psychologist.

Before I started using this for hiring I paid to have three people already on staff fill out a profile. I knew these guys, we had worked together for at least a year. I was astonished by the detail with with the person interpreting the test could describe the personalities of our folks. Things like "Joe is a pretty smart guy but he tends not to over exert himself, and yet no-one ever gets mad at him because he is so charming.". Maybe you had to be there and maybe you need to know Joe but the description was spot on. And time has just proven this was not a fluke.

Our folks are all consultants, they have to be good problems solvers and good "people" people. Based on our experience, we have found that these tests can be helpful in understanding

• Analytical capability (that's pretty easy to believe eh slashdotters? Just ask some "what number comes next in the series" and similar questions
• Empathy - how much do you care to understand the other guy's perspective?
• Gregariousness - its harder to fool the 1 hour test than it is to fool me in a 1 hour interview I have found.
• Priority setting - a key charateristic for bringing projects under budget.
• Self Confidence - another important trait for people in our business since the only way to never make a mistake is to stay home in bed.
• Trust in other people - do you believe the people around you are likely to act in your mutual best interests or are most people out only for themselves? You want team members to be the sorts of people who havfe inherent trust in their fellow human beings.

These tests can help tell you if you are inclined to be a good sales person vs a good engineer for example.

And its not mumbo jumbo that drives this. Its just freaking statistics. You do a lot of research characterizing lots of people and then you find a set of questions whose answers correlate the characteristics you have observed.

Having added this testing to our interview process, we have dropped our bad hiring decisions from 30% to less than 10%. Personally, again, I think its a courtesy to all concerned to do everything you reasonably can to try to ensure that new employees will be a fit.

So maybe you have seen poorly designed tests - but trust me, there are reputable firms out there that do everyone a huge favor by helping to ensure that the people we offer jobs to will do well in them and be happy because they are strong in the personal characteristics required by the job.

I think I have a pretty good perspective on the "Dilbert factor". I have worked for Chevron (9 years), IBM (3 months) and McKinsey (2 years) and was 1 degree of separation from Scott Adams when he was at Pacific Bell. So there's my big company experience.

On the other side, I am the owner of a 15 person IT consulting firm which services only companies of 10 to 200, and so I have worked with over 50 companies of this size - in addition to owning one.

Here is the simple truth of the matter:

If a small company runs on politics, rather than business sense, it goes out of business. Yes there are exceptions - owner has a huge chunk of cash to burn - but this is very largely true. So there is very little b.s. in small business.

In large businesses, sad but true, it becomes very very hard to distinguish the true business contribution of one person from another. Also, the consequence of a good / bad decision may take years to come to light. So, whether people say so or not, you are judged on how well you fit into the culture. If you know this, understand it and accept it, you will do fine. If you act like a typical engineer and say "but my idea was better", you will be miserable. Instead of being upset at the fact that the MBA's are running the show, sit back and ask yourself why that is. If you are as smart as you think you are - you will figure it out.

The fact is that the success of big business depends on people working together. And this quality, one of fitting in, is easier to pick out than what the true ROI of converting all those Windows servers to Linux is.

Think really, really hard on this. Don't reject reality and say "it stinks" - use a bit of ju jitsu - accept reality, understand why this reality exists, and use that understanding in an effective way to achieve your personal vision of success.

A way of thinking

This reality stinks
It shouldn't be this way
I can't affect what happens

A better way of thinking

What is really going on here?
It is this way, why is that so?
I can affect how I react to what happens.

Do this and you may be very happy at a big business since you will learn how to rise within it to the point that you have real influence. If you don't understand this you will be frustrated regardless of where you work.