“Well, how else am I supposed to find the right person if these tests don’t work?”

This is a common sentiment I’ve heard while talking to hiring managers when I bring up the weaknesses of some of the most commonly used psychometric tests. Increasingly, hiring managers are searching for ways to differentiate as greater numbers of candidates apply for their roles. According to Glassdoor, the average job opening attracts 250 resumes. Even pre-interview, you’re going to be investing a great deal of time to sort through those resumes if you’re doing so manually which is why so many organizations now utilize recruiting software, personality tests, integrity tests, etc.

Unfortunately issues often arise when considerations aren’t made for which tools are being used and how they’re being used. While many of these tools are built to be intuitive to test takers and administrators, their selection and interpretation processes can be anything but. The question, “Should I use Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Disc Assessment, Big Five Personality Assessment?” or any of countless others is going to depend on your population, the job you’re hiring for and the amount of resources you want to use in hiring. The question, “Someone is more feeling than thinking, is that something that’s going to affect their performance?” is more complicated than one might expect.

Pitfalls

A crucial action that is often missed by companies looking to utilize these tools is to identify, empirically, what traits improve outcomes in their employees. While intuition has its places in hiring, this is one of the places where having an objective correct answer will be to your benefit. Traits that are useful in one role, company or even office may be detrimental in another, for example neuroticism is a positive predictor of job performance in librarians and accountants but is a strong predictor of burnout in nurses. The goal is a long-term development process that is tested and has buy in from multiple stakeholders within the hiring organization.

In striving toward equity, objective metrics are often used to avoid bias. As someone who has studied measurement and seen what proper use of it can do for organizations that place high value on quality of evidence, I can say that this is the first step toward a strong assessment minded business. From psychometric tests to quantitative skill ratings, all this effort is getting at one thing: who will be my best employee. A particularly attractive idea in the absence of the empirical correlations I’ve recommended is to compare the prevalence of certain characteristics and ascribe them to professions. An article from CNBC lists a best career for each of the 16 MBTI personality types based on how common that personality shows up relative to the proportion of them in the general population. An example of this would be that while ESTP’s are only 10% of the population, they are 15% military officers and so significantly over-represented.

When looking at the relationship between one’s MBTI and profession, confounding factors, or factors that influence both the predictor and the construct you’re trying to predict, tend to explain a large portion of the MBTI’s variance. Certain professions that are dominated by a specific gender like nursing or plumbing are predicted well by MBTI, which is a big positive! That is until you realize that the MBTI is also correlated with gender, and you indirectly are predicting men and women to stay in the roles they’ve been in historically. This issue is not unique to this test, as personality is linked intrinsically to age and gender. Most glaringly, the decisions made to include someone based on their personality do not consider whether an ESFJ is truly a better salesperson or engineer than an INTJ.

Solutions

I don’t want this paper to be all gloom with no payoff though so finally I’ll be talking about ways to still improve your recruitment and utilize these tools, even without a trained psychometrician. The biggest help will be to consider the consistency of the results. Do not assume the test result is correct if it contradicts other information, but also do not disregard it if it does not confirm your results. Read the construct definitions carefully and if possible investigate how they were created, this may be illuminating. Finally, research who your best workers will be beyond going with your gut. This may take longer but the time will pay off dividends when you find your new best employee.



























































