When Anton Smith applied for hourly work at a Finish Line sneaker store in Charlotte, N.C., his first hurdle was showing he had the temperament for the job.

Finish Line Inc., like many other retailers, makes applicants take a personality test before it will consider interviewing them. The test asks whether they agree or disagree, and how strongly, with 130 statements. But thanks to a little digging on the Internet by a friend, which turned up an unauthorized answer key, when Mr. Smith took the test in late 2007 he had a good idea what the employer wanted to hear.

Anton Smith

Statement: "You have to give up on some things that you start." Suggested response from the cheat sheet: "Strongly disagree."

Another statement: "Any trouble you have is your own fault." Suggested response: "Strongly agree."

The store hired Mr. Smith, 23 years old, for a part-time job, although the parent company later closed that outlet and Mr. Smith has moved on. His view of the pre-employment test: "It isn't useful. People are hip to it."

Many retailers have largely automated the hiring process with online personality tests such as Mr. Smith took. The system cuts the time store managers must spend in interviewing applicants. But the test also is creating a culture of cheating and raising questions for applicants about its fairness -- even as it becomes a critical determinant of who gets a job and who doesn't in a stressful era of rising unemployment.

Today, many retailers are cutting their work forces, but that just makes the test even more critical. So many people now are seeking what jobs remain in retail that the test's maker says it processed about 29 applications for every opening in 2008, up from 22 in 2007. Meanwhile, for the retailers, it has become doubly important now to employ only the most productive people.

Join a Discussion Do people cheat more now than they did before the days of the Internet?

The producer of the test, called Unicru, says it believes the incidence of cheating is low, because there's no decline in the benefits it brings retailers: lower employee turnover, better safety and improved sales performance. "We see absolutely no evidence of any significant cheating taking place in the use of our assessments or that the cheating is substantially affecting the validity of the assessments," says David Scarborough, who helped develop the test and works for its owner, Kronos Inc.

Turnover at Finish Line declined after the chain adopted the test in 2003, saving about $1 million a year, according to marketing material for the test. Finish Line had no comment.

The Unicru test is the most common automated assessment of people seeking hourly jobs in retail. Kronos says it is used in 16% of all major retail hiring in the U.S.

Green, Yellow or Red

The test aims to screen out those with personalities that make them less suited for such work. Kronos scores applicants as green, yellow or red and delivers the results instantly to retailers, each of which can set its own minimum score for the top rating of green. At Best Buy Co. , about 50% of applicants score green.

Some applicants take a personality test using in-store devices like this one at a CVS store in New York. Matthew Craig/MJR for The Wall Street Journal

This is "just one piece of the hiring process," says Kronos's Dr. Scarborough. "Interviews and management judgment are still key parts of the equation."

But applicants scoring yellow or red are unlikely to get an interview. At CVS Caremark Corp. , a manager with a job opening gets a fax from Unicru with data only on applicants rated green. "The only time we go into yellows is sometimes for scheduling flexibility, if a store needs someone on a particular shift, but that's a rare exception," says Michael Ferdinandi, head of human resources.

How well the test distinguishes good candidates from less good is difficult to judge. CVS Caremark is pleased with it. "Since we put this in place, I think our field organization is happy with the quality of the candidate," Mr. Ferdinandi says.

A Best Buy executive, Kristopher Arnes, says the test lets the chain's managers "focus only on the people who, statistically, are the right candidates," saving 250,000 to 300,000 hours of labor annually.

On the other side, Whole Foods Market Inc. dropped the test, partly because applicants for jobs preparing foods "would pass the screening test and then get on the job and did not have the skills to prepare basic sauces," says a spokeswoman. Kronos says its assessments "are personality-based, not skills-based."

The more critical the test has become to getting a job, the more applicants are trying to game it. They do so by repeating the test several times, by comparing notes, by consulting an online cheat sheet or by having a friend take the test for them.

Mark Scott, 21, of North Port, Fla., took the Unicru test when seeking a job at Circuit City in 2007 and learned from a friend at the store that he scored a disqualifying red. Mr. Scott decided to apply to another chain that used the test, Blockbuster Inc.

A friend, Phillip Sullivan, had taken the test many times, and "I told him, 'If you want, I can show you how to pass it,'" Mr. Sullivan says. He went to Mr. Scott's home and together they took the test at the Circuit City Web site, for practice. Then Mr. Scott applied to Blockbuster, answering the test the way Mr. Sullivan had showed him, and was hired immediately.

In addition, Mr. Scott says he now knows where to find an answer key online. The test process, he contends, just "weeds out people who are honest and selects those who lie."

Blockbuster says it has since dropped the Unicru test, although not because of any concern about cheating.

Melanie Shebel, who has a blog that often focuses on the alleged unfairness of Unicru, says she's seen a huge uptick in traffic as the economy has worsened and people have grown more frustrated by the job-seeking process. After an anonymous poster on her site put up an answer key to the Unicru test, she took it down, fearing a lawsuit from Kronos. But recently, she says, she re-posted it, after reviewing her legal rights.

Answer keys can also be found on Facebook. There used to be one on Wikipedia, but the site's volunteer administrators took it down after a complaint from Kronos.

Mark Scott Evan Neil

Trial and Error

It's hard to know the accuracy of these answer keys. Those who use them generally don't view them as the product of an inside leak but merely as the fruit of trial and error by applicants who managed to get retail jobs.

George Paajanen, a Unicru psychologist from 1999 to 2006, says that to cheat, "a person needs feedback on which answers were 'correct.' That feedback isn't available to test takers." As a result, he says, it "is not possible for the Unicru test answers in the online posting to be an accurate answer key."

Dr. Scarborough says Kronos has taken steps to have such keys removed from Internet sites because they represent copyrighted material. In addition, he says, "the suggested answers are frequently incorrect, out-of-date or both."

Still, no answer key is needed in the case of surrogate test takers. Jayne Roberts, who used to work at a job where she reviewed the Unicru ratings of hundreds of applicants, says she grew so disdainful of the test that she has cheated to spite the test company. She says she recently took the test twice for a friend who needed a job quickly.

"I don't see a direct correlation at all" between top scores and good customer service, says Ms. Roberts, 26, of La Porte, Ind. In her view, "it is just a way for companies to hire robots. A lot of people who score green just figured out how to cheat the system, or are just the 'yes' people, and I don't believe it makes them more capable than anyone else." Ms. Roberts, now a manager for Spencer Gifts, which doesn't use the test, oversaw its use during a year she spent at a Best Buy store in Valparaiso, Ind.

Best Buy says it's confident most of its job applicants are honest. "Nothing is 100%, but we do know that cheating or having someone else take the assessment for you doesn't increase your probability of success," says the chain's manager of corporate public relations, Dawn Bryant. One reason she cites: Kronos uses scoring methodology that tends to thwart cheaters.

Kronos confirms that. "The way in which the answers relate to the job requirements is...not obvious," says Dr. Scarborough, a Ph.D. industrial psychologist. And when applicants can't easily see how test questions relate to the job, "they tend to respond honestly to the questions," providing "a built-in design safeguard against 'gaming' or cheating."

Pre-employment job screening efforts date back to a century ago, when industrial psychologists realized that some people adjusted better to certain occupations than to others and that differences in temperament mattered. By the early 1990s, industrial psychologists developed multiple-choice tests to measure dependability and reliability in hourly workers.

Unicru, which initially made devices to help retailers prevent employee theft, started focusing on ways to select job candidates from one of the largest employment pools in the U.S.: hourly retail workers. At first, job applicants took its personality test at in-store kiosks. Results were sent instantly to hiring managers, who could interview high-scoring candidates before they left. Now, 90% of the time the test is taken online, says Kronos, a private company in Chelmsford, Mass., that acquired Unicru in 2006.

It offers about a dozen versions of its test. They assess job applicants with a focus on dependability, customer service and safety, for instance -- concentrating on traits such as self-control, liking people or adaptability. The firm processed more than 10 million such assessments in 2008. It now markets under the name Kronos Talent Management, but many clients still use the Unicru name.

Some job applicants say they feel inclined to cheat, or help others do so, to get back at a test they feel unfairly rejected them because they answered it honestly. They've set up groups, such as "Workers and Employers Against Unicru," on Facebook.

Posted on Facebook

John Soong, 18, says that after he had failed to get jobs at several chains that use the test, he began to poke around for an answer key, driven by "altruistic, and maybe vengeful," motives. In a discussion section of a Wikipedia entry, he saw a mention of a set of Unicru statements and answers that had been posted there but removed. Using privileges as a volunteer Wikipedia administrator, which gave him access to deleted page histories, Mr. Soong, a University of Virginia student, was able to recover the answer key and re-post it on Facebook.

Richard Pedretti-Allen

A spokesman for Facebook says it hasn't gotten any complaints about the Unicru groups.

Even though the Unicru test measures something that is supposedly immutable -- an applicant's personality -- those who do poorly on the test can usually try it over and over. Most retailers let applicants who score yellow or red take the test again as soon as their initial job application expires, often in 30 days. The hiring manager at a store, in most cases, won't know their original score.

This scenario bothers Sonya Sullins, president of Human Capital Management Institute, a consulting firm that works with a Wisconsin nursing-home chain that uses Unicru tests. "I don't want my reds coming back around" as yellows or greens, she says.

Dr. Scarborough of Kronos says allowing repeat tests makes sense because getting an initial low score doesn't necessarily mean an applicant won't be acceptable for another job at the same employer.

Richard Pedretti-Allen in McKinney, Texas, set about creating his own deconstruction of the Unicru test after failing to get hired at Best Buy.

"I don't like getting bumped out of the running because I am overanalyzing some goofball quiz," says Mr. Pedretti-Allen, a 50-year-old single father and former telecommunications engineer. "I am going to try to figure out what the answers are, or should be," he says. "Then, the next time I have to take it, I am going to pull out the test, and I will go, strongly agree, strongly disagree, strongly agree, and go through the thing."

That can wait, though. Mr. Pedretti-Allen just got a job answering customers' questions for Flextronics International Ltd. , the electronics manufacturer. He didn't have to take Unicru.

Write to Vanessa O'Connell at vanessa.o'connell@wsj.com