Where do you stand on the Big Five? How neurotic, extroverted, agreeable,
conscientious and open to experience do you really think you are? Completed
that task?
Okay, now you’d better rate yourself on Raymond Cattell’s 16 personality
factors – warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, dominance and so on. When
you’ve done that, there’s this occupational personality questionnaire to
fill in and, just to be on the safe side, you’d better do the Hogan
personality inventory. Talent Q’s Dimensions test should round that off
nicely and then we can run the whole thing through an Activ8 meta-analysis
and, all being well, we can start the interviewing process.
Oh, and by the way, do you ever turn up late for meetings? No. Sorry, wrong
answer, close the door behind you.
Welcome to the weird world of psychometrics. If you want to work for a big
company there’s at least a 70% chance that before being given a job you will
be subjected to a personality test by one of the big four – MBTI
(Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), 16PF (16 personality factors), OPQ
(occupational personality questionnaire) or Hogan – and an ability exam
measuring verbal reasoning and numeracy. These are basically IQ tests by
another name.
Soon all big companies will be doing this, as well as increasing numbers of
small ones. And don’t say you just want to be a shelf stacker – that job is
also being psychometricated.
Modern life and particularly the corporate world is awash with this
psychobabble and the business is booming. Why? Well, according to the
Association of Graduate Recruiters, it’s because nobody trusts university
degrees any more. It has just issued a report saying degree standards are
inconsistent and, as a result, companies are turning to psychometrics. But
Ceri Roderick at occupation psychologists Pearn Kandola adds two other
reasons.
“Companies want to know things like the motivational characteristics of
recruits and the technology is now available to do these things.”
There’s also a fourth reason: the need to compete for quality recruits.
“There’s a war for talent,” says Professor David Bartram of the British
Psychological Society (BPS), “companies are fighting to get the best people.”
All of which means there is now a rapid proliferation of psychometrics
consultancies, most of them offering candidates the chance to do all the
tests online. There’s also intense competition to come up with better,
faster, more technologically sophisticated tests. And, with online testing,
new artificially intelligent systems are being introduced. For example,
using item response theory, these machines can adapt questions in response
to your answers. The job interview with Marvin the paranoid android cannot
be not far away.
Sceptics think the whole enterprise is misguided. In America a book – The Cult
of Personality by Annie Murphy Paul – has cast doubt on the intellectual
credibility of psychometrics.
“Remember,” she writes, “that promoters of the tests – from the Rorschach to
today’s inventories of the Big Five – have claimed for nearly a century that
they possess an x-ray of personality. But in truth...the x-ray is more like
a mirror, reflecting mostly the testers’ own needs and wants. The tests say
more about them than they do about us.”
In support of Paul’s book the author Malcolm Gladwell questions the very idea
of measuring personality: “We have a personality in the sense that we have a
consistent pattern of behaviour. But that pattern is complex and that
personality is contingent: it represents an interaction between our internal
disposition and tendencies and the situations that we find ourselves in.”
So what does it all mean? Is this industry all snake oil and superstition or
are psychometric tests a serious recruitment tool?
First, let’s be clear, there is a lot of snake oil and superstition. Most of
the personality tests you can find free online are useless. I did a few and
they came up with exactly the personality I was trying to force on them by
manipulating my answers. They’re fun in a horoscope kind of way – try a few
at www.queendom.com if you fancy it –
but they’re a warning that the industry boom makes psychometrics vulnerable
to the usual cast of hucksters.
But are Gladwell and Paul right to question the whole theory on which they are
based? The history of psychometrics marches hand in hand with the history of
IQ testing. Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, produced the first modern
IQ test in 1905 and Walter Dill Scott subjected 15 engineering graduates to
the first psychometric test in 1915. Both ideas were inspired by the
conviction that there could be no reason why the human mind should be
impervious to scientific investigation.
The IQ test has since been subjected to wave after wave of scorn, most
commonly because it is seen as absurd to pretend to be able to reduce a
phenomenon as complex as intelligence to a single figure, but also because
results were found to vary from culture to culture and time to time.
Nevertheless the idea survives in, among other places, the ability tests
used by psychometricians. As Steve O’Dell of the occupational psychology
consultants Talent Q says: “Studies have shown that intelligence testing is
the single greatest predictor of employee long-term potential.”
This is true but it is a statement that has to be treated with extreme
caution. What it emphatically cannot mean is that we have found any
universal system of measuring intelligence. What it means is that we have
found a system that fits the expectations of our society.
The psychometric faith that we have cracked the human personality by reducing
it to five or 16 categories is equally misleading. As with the IQ tests, we
have simply found a system that works in the context of a modern highly
developed society. Any idea that occupational or educational psychologists
have come up with some universal and timeless metric for the human mind is
pure superstition.
There is no doubt, however, that within the narrow parameters of employee
selection, psychometrics – using both personality and ability components –
works. This is because it is not really your personality as such that is
being measured, but rather those detectable inclinations and abilities that
may indicate you will be right for a specific job.
Making them do this has been quite an achievement because psychometric testing
of the personality began with superstition. The MBTI test, for example, was
developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter solely on the basis of a
reading of Carl Jung’s Psychological Types. This suggested there were
specific personality categories. Cattell, an Anglo-American psychologist,
developed the 16PR test using 16 personality factors. And all the tests can
be said to adhere to the Big Five list of key personality attributes.
This is interesting but it is emphatically not science. Types are not inside
the mind, they are merely terms that allow us to describe a certain limited
number of interactions between the mind and the world.
Furthermore, testees’ subsequent responses can be distorted by what is known
as the Forer effect. As with astrology or palm reading, people tend to
believe anything they are told about their personality and, consequently, if
you tell them they have a type X personality they will behave as if they
have. In some firms employees all know their MBTI rating – a sign that they
are letting the test create rather than measure reality.
Nevertheless, the tests are not necessarily dependent on a background of
dubious theory because their methods are in fact quite subtle. One typical
test method is to use forced choice questions. So, for example, you might be
asked what you are most like – strong, enthusiastic, caring or questioning.
If you answer “strong” you will then be asked which of the remaining three
you are least like and so on. Or you will be asked to rate the statement “I
often like to watch team games” as true, false or don’t know.
To measure your honesty level in answering you will also be asked to rate
statements such as “I am never late for any meeting”. Since everybody is
occasionally late for a meeting, if you say this is true then you’re clearly
trying too hard to please the examiner. The safe answer is yes.
But the one big question I put to half a dozen psychometricians was: if
everybody is taking these tests, won’t they learn to do them better or
indeed cheat more effectively? The answers were a) no and b) there is no
point.
It is true, they said, that you can improve yourself by practising ability
tests in advance, but you can only go so far. Ultimately you either can or
cannot do verbal reasoning or handle numbers. On personality tests, you
cannot improve or even cheat because there are no right answers. Your
results will either fit you for the job or they won’t, but if they don’t
it’s as much in your interests as the company’s that you’re not selected.
But won’t all this testing simply turn your workforce into a drab, homogenised
bunch of slavish test-passers? Won’t they cut out the real geniuses? For
example, having spoken to Bill Gates at length, I have serious doubts about
whether he would end up being selected.
No, says John Hackston of OPP, the second biggest testing company after SHL,
because the tests do not exclude genius. They simply find the basic
necessities for doing the job – genius is neither excluded nor included. “We
are not looking for a cardboard cut-out,” he says, “nor a piece to fit into
a jigsaw puzzle.”
Psychometrics works, but only if the tests are properly applied, rigorously
interpreted and accompanied by traditional interviews. This means they do
not necessarily speed up the recruitment process. They might, however, help
weed out unsuitables in advance, a huge benefit at a time when all companies
are swamped with applicants for attractive jobs.
But we have to tread very carefully indeed down this road, especially now that
new psychometric consultancies with new gimmicks are appearing almost daily.
The potential for abuse is limitless. In my view, psychometrics is already
being seriously abused by those companies that ask employees to be tested
after having been made to reapply for their own jobs. This is,
scientifically and morally, insane.
Above all, nobody should fall into the trap of thinking it is your actual
personality that is being measured. That way lies madness, superstition and
zombie-like submission to a technocratic dictatorship. All that is being
measured is your conformity with a limited number of correlations between
test scores and workplace performance.
Analyse this
Do you pick your nose when you’re alone?
This has probably never been used but it’s an example of a test question to
which the right answer is yes. This shows honesty.
I often like to watch team games. True, false or don’t know?
A typical question designed to find how much of a team player you might be.
But “true” may not be the right answer as they might be looking for an
individualist.
Who are you?
Never been asked, but if it ever is, answer: “I don’t know and, more to the
point, you never will.”
