Customer Reviews

Employment Personality Tests Decoded

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This is not a scholarly approach to corporate assessments. Rather, it's a light, colloquial discussion of the concept of employment-related skills and personality assessments, followed by some rather interesting sample tests created primarily by the author, Anne Hart. The book contains 115 pages of commentary, followerd by another hundred pages of sample tests -- though not any you might expect to find. The author makes a number of interesting points and gives the reader plenty of suggestions for further reading, but I don't think you'll find extensive information about how the more widely used assessments are structured and evaluated.

What I like best about the book are the author's interviews with corporate trainers, consultants, and organization effectiveness specialists about how they uses certain assessments. The author also includes plenty of references and websites for the reader to explore -- and she references Annie Murphy Paul's The Cult of Personality many, many times.

The author repeatedly advises that the primary reason an employee is selected for a position (hired or promoted) is because the employee creates the least financial risk for the company -- or alternatively, the least risk for the boss. She also adds that an employee is hired because she connects well with others, not because she's well-connected. The author advises test-takers to always choose the most extreme answers on honesty tests -- always strongly agreeing or strongly disagreeing with the position that shows the most loyalty to the company. Later, she advises test-takers to be cautious and choose middle of the road answers on anger assessments. The advice alone is confusing. She also advises test-takers to call their prospective employers' HR department, ask what tests are used, and then get a copy of the test from the publisher and take it in advance. Publishers of reputable assessments would not make the assessment available to an untrained individual, and it is unlikely that an untrained individual could make sense of the assesment even if were able to score a copy.

The most disappointing part of the book came with the author's self-designed personality tests in the appendix. Honestly, I can't imagine that any reputable employer would use anything like these assessments. The author acknowledges that the tests are for fun, and amazingly, she encourages the reader to design his/her own personality tests -- although the value of a test that hasn't been validated is pretty limited -- entertainment value only.

Many of the questions in the author's self-designed personality assessments involve choosing a mate or someone to date. Even when the questions border on being work-related, they're a little odd, usually involving a dating scenario -- like asking how you would choose between a career conference and a singles-only convention in Rio. For example,

-One question involves how you would react to being told you had to fire someone who took too long to return from maternity/paternity leave -- and here's the kicker -- this is someone you'd really like to date, and you even hoped to marry if things worked out right. Would you terminate the person as ordered or not? Either choice involves you being able to aske the person out and date them. Huh???

-Another question about which of two supervisors you'd prefer -- in part, based on the supervisor's response to the fact that you are dating the supervisor's adult child.

-In one question, you must interview blind dates in order to choose one to escort you on a world cruise. Each applicants have a half hour interview. You now have only ten minutes to choose the winner. Would you prefer each applicant to come in at the sceheduled interview time or just walk in off the street and surprise you?

I've had jobs where I had to make decisions with limited information. I've had jobs where I've had to make decisions under tremendous time pressure. But I've never been in a job where I had ten minutes to choose a blind date to escort me on a world cruise.

Overall, this is somewhat interesting to read and it is full of suggestions on websites to visit and other places to look. But a scholarly or well-researched approach to employment personality tests -- that's one thing it isn't.