©
2007 by Anne Hart
The purpose and unique contribution
of writing the book titled, Employment Personality Tests Decoded is to guide readers towards the goal of understanding
that workplace decisions may be made about you by your employer based on abilities tests or personality assessments that may
or may not be always valid. You need to ask for feedback on any assessments you take. And ask your employer to keep your results
confidential.
What the assessment is supposed
to measure and what your employer thinks it measures may be different. Your employer might be looking for depth or breadth
when the test is measuring a voice of resilience and self-confidence. And in an employment personality test, you’re
looking for a valued ‘beast’ that enjoys tunneling into that well of sanity called a long-time career.
A test might use the word, ‘dovetail’ as a verb to mean “work well with” existing markets. You might
want a test that uses plain language to say what it’s supposed to mean. Many tests of personality, cognitive, or job
skills turn out to be timed tests of reading comprehension.
Personality or abilities
tests need to be handled like confidential medical records. Find out whether or not test results are given to your health
insurance company along with medical information. Psychological testing, like medical exams should be confidential and not
stored in open-ended databases in your employer’s human resources department.
Users of psychological tests
include employers, teachers, school guidance and career counselors, outsourced consultants, clergy, and workshop leaders who
are independent contractors. Is the person administering the tests trained in the pitfalls to avoid—hindsight? Has your
boss researched alternative types of assessments and given you a choice as to which you prefer?
What decisions are being
made about you based on taking corporate tests? Are assessments part of the hiring process, or given mainly to executives
to build better teams? The second reason I wrote Employment Personality Tests Decoded, is to look at the root
of where the definitions, origins, or coding of a variety of personality tests actually come from.
Part of my day is spent reading
books on population genetics that looks at prehistoric migrations and origins, historical linguistics that looks at origins
of words, and reading about the roots of behavior and personality choices—how and why people make specific decisions
under reduced time pressures. That’s bad in a work place—to have to make more decisions under continuing reduced
time. You have to make good decisions. But whether decisions are good or bad often are validated by peers at work.
The other part of my day
is spent on writing books, including novels and plays, or articles and digitally designing the book covers or developing behavior
assessments. My specialty emphasizes behavioral and consumer science journalism as well as researching and writing ethnography
through fiction.
In Employment Personality
Tests Decoded, the search focused on exploring the source or roots of the migration and origin of the actual words used
in personality assessments. Those questionnaires contain words that are supposed to define the preferences people choose.
The roots of personality and character choices are found in dictionaries and thesauri and in all types of word glossaries.
The branches are found
in older, popular, best-selling, and well-validated tests of personality given by psychologists such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) which is one of the most frequently used personality assessments in the mental
health fields, according to the book titled, Psychological Testing: a Practical Introduction Hogan TP (2003). 1st,Wiley,
504–12. This assessment, or test, was designed to help identify personal, social, and behavioral problems in psychiatric
patients.
The test helps provide
relevant information to aid in problem identification, diagnosis, and treatment planning for the patient. Also see another
good source titled, The Use of Integrity Tests for Pre-Employment Screening (PDF). OTA-SET-442 NTIS order #PB91-107011. But in employment situations, most likely a normal person is being
tested for personality choices, preferences, traits, styles, and decisions. The test is to see how well the person fits in
with the mission, philosophy, goals and character of a corporation and its owners.
What happens when
a true or false statement on a questionnaire is experimental and doesn’t measure anything? For example, the statement that required a true or false answer that read, "I enjoyed reading Alice in Wonderland
" appeared in the original edition of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) administered to job applicants.
A newer version of the test, MMPI-2 published in 1989 dropped the statement, but it still appears in another test, the California
Psychological Inventory (CPI).
Some questions or statements
requiring a true or false answer are experimental in tests and do not measure a specific personality trait. And some of these
assessments are given to job applicants at a wide variety of corporations. The Buros Institute of Mental Measurements has
test reviews online at: http://buros.unl.edu/buros/jsp/search.jsp.
Another branch from which some personality tests evolved focused on descriptions from any of the
five revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a handbook for mental health professionals. The manual lists different categories of mental disorder and the criteria for diagnosing them, according to the publishing organization the American Psychiatric Association. It is used worldwide by clinicians and researchers as well as insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and policy makers.
Some personality
questionnaires have been designed based on less extreme variations of the various mental disorders discussed in the revised
DSM. After all, personality abnormality is in part what is found in normal personalities, but becomes abnormal when taken
to the extreme. For example, an employer might want to hire a talkative person, but could hire a person scoring as a quiet
introvert instead who could be trained to focus on specific statistical information to be given to sales clients or when training
salespersons in how to give precise information to the public.
When you design a test, often
you watch regional and international “intimate glimpses” of two people chatting about a third person behind that
individual’s back. What are they saying when they describe a behavior, preference, decision, choice, or transition?
Why do people take a particular path, choose the road not taken, or validate their values by waiting for more information
or quickly deciding so they can move on or transcend past mistakes? Sometimes personality testing has its roots in cultural
anthropology. Personality defines your values.
The reason I went first to
the dictionary to find out how people describe personality choices is to see why people choose either direction or information
that is supposed to be “the right fit”, feels good, and is a healthier choice in the long term for their physiology.
Other people might make a career or even marriage selection based on what pleases another person who has been given power
over the person who has to make a choice. From the employer’s perch, a person is hired when he or she poses the least
financial risk to the employer and can connect and communicate well with employers, colleagues, and peers.
There has been a lot of writing
in the past decade about the cult of personality chatter. Employers question the fact that tests have been designed
both by specialists and generalists. Almost anyone can make up a questionnaire to poll preferences in work-style or lifestyle
that people seek to merge.
You’re supposed to
play at work and have fun in your career. Work is supposed to be charismatic because you’re supposed to love what you
do all day for four or five decades and beyond. Corporations have characters just as people have personalities, and the corporations
reflect the personalities and missions of those who run or own those companies.
Even one of the world’s
most popular and best-selling personality assessments used today by major corporations was designed by a person whose college
coursework consisted of an undergraduate degree in home economics. Is that important? No. My graduate degree was in English/creative
writing—historical fiction emphasis. If you are creative enough to see patterns in nature and explore in writing, you
can design personality questionnaires if you can back engineer them from the code just like a scientist would back-engineer
a propulsion system.
There are visionary corporations
that look forward to rapid change, and traditional firms that imitate successful corporations that worked well in the past
who run tight ships that don’t change quickly enough for their visionary employees. The purpose in all these employment
tests is to make sure that workers aren’t square pegs in round holes. The assessments are to help people find the right
fit of employee or manager to corporation or entrepreneurism. Some companies want creative people.
Some employers want
people who can 'think,' and still others want people who can do their work quickly with high accuracy and increase production.
Other firms want persuasive, outgoing, and informed salespeople to bring in the revenue.
Most corporations don’t
choose employment personality tests that aren’t validated, time-tested, and haven’t proven themselves. On the
other hand, employers want to have a reliable measure to validate career coaches. And career coaches want to have a reliable
measure to validate the tests.
Going to the source, those
who watch the watchers want to validate people who design the tests—the organizational and social psychologists and
psychometrics specialists that score various tests. I wrote this book to look at who watches the watchers and to get at the
root of how personality tests are designed in the first place and discuss why as well as design some tests of my own.
The fact is that in today’s
world, anyone can design a test, assessment, questionnaire, or classifier of any category as long as there are people to take
the test and others to validate the tests. If you go back to the roots, the dictionary and thesauri, you can find descriptions
and definitions of behavior that we call personality or character. It’s really a definitions of behavior and choices
based on individual and universal values…what you really have determined works best for you, your existence, health,
and peace of mind…what is the best fit.
Personality assessment is
about choices and decisions, and how you take in information. It’s about whether you enjoy more logistics and bean counting
or abstract thinking and working with intangible ideas, relying on intuition, looking for patterns in nature, and conceptual
leaps or more on working with tangible objects about what you experience when you go beyond your senses—touch, texture,
mood, sight, hearing, speech, taste, counting, sorting, or performing.
You don’t have to be
a PhD in organizational or industrial psychology to design personality assessments. Many are designed by instructional/educational
technologists, human resources department managers, career coaches, and people with bachelor’s degrees in any of the
liberal arts that take a qualifying course in administering a particular test or group of tests. These people are then certified
to give certain personality tests and may be outsourced by corporations to administer a test to managers or others. But those
who administer tests are different from those who design the tests.
The fact is that there is
no licensing board that says you have to have had certain degrees or coursework before you can design a personality assessment.
Anyone can design any type of test for entertainment purposes and put it online. The trick is to get a corporation to use
the test.
Tests of honesty and some
cognitive tests are given by department or human resource managers in some corporations and scored by a computer while the
job applicant waits. And to do that, you need to show the test has been validated in print by a reliable, professional group.
Most employers refer to the Mental Measurements Yearbooks also found in most local university or public libraries.
A current set of Mental
Measurements Yearbooks contains “basic information” about various “personality tests” or abilities
assessments. Read psychologists’ ‘critiques’ of these assessments. The critiques are used as validation
tools by numerous corporations for various tests used. Some companies also have their own tests designed by their own staff.
I wrote the book because
of the very wide diversity of employment personality tests being given by an even wider diversity of corporations and employers
to all levels of job applicants, executives, managers, and team development specialists. There's also a wide variety of cognitive
and job skills tests given as well as tests of integrity, honesty, anger management, and decision-making. Who watchers
the watchers? Who designs tests? Who evaluates and validates the tests--actually called assessments because some are questionnaires,
classifiers, or indicators. Who makes these tests credible, reliable, affordable, and acceptable? It’s a test consumer’s
right to explore all the possibilities.
***
Why Are Personality Tests Given by Corporations?
Personality tests are given
for three reasons. To hire the employee who poses the least financial risk to the corporation is the primary reason why corporations
give tests. A secondary reason is to find ways to improve decision-making skills under reduced time pressure among executives
and to improve team-building strategies. A third reason is to help cut down measurable increasing violence in the workplace
by better screening.
Employers are
afraid of hiring liars, bullies, and loose cannons that can’t connect with other works and fit into the group or make
good decisions under pressure and work well with teams. Whereas corporations are expected by law to hire and accommodate people
with disabilities if they can do the required job tasks, employers don’t want disruptive or potentially violent people
in the workplaces.
The trouble is corporate testing can’t screen out the potentially violent partners, relatives, and spouses of workers. A
sore point is whether to hire a depressed worker who put on the charm at work but could turn violent under pressure in
the future.
The big question is ‘could’.
So corporations want to cut risk and increase assurance with employees. Employees want to feel safe from fellow co-workers.
Employers need but don’t yet have a flawless
system with time-tested rules to screen and train workers at all levels. Test designers have a mission, to find the flaws
in the tests and to build into tests alarms that recognize ‘lies’ on the answer sheets.
The exordial and sometimes hidden reasons for giving certain
types of personality profiling, integrity, and anger assessments is that some corporate questionnaires with built-in
‘lie’ alarms may help screen out potentially disruptive, angry, dishonest, or violent employees in an indirect
way without the test-taker knowing it. Some tests seek insight into a worker’s values, integrity, and loyalty.
Corporations want to prescind (withdraw) attention to screening
out bullies that assault and focus on testing for self-insight and honesty. Employers care how workers solve conflicts
because they have to pay insurance premiums whenever a worker has to make an impact on co-workers or supervisors
or bosses begin to harass or intimidate workers because they think they can.
The ultimate goal of the assessment is to find out how employees can avoid conflict and miscommunication by seeking self-insight
from the testing. At the same time a test should help save time, increase production levels, revenues, and employee turnover,
including down time due to employee conflicts.
Tests have their own buzz
appeal because they attract media attention when the tests are there to screen out potentially violent job applicants. ‘Anger’
tests bring drama to the workplace. Human resource personnel, coaches, psychologists, and instructional designers call corporate
personality tests ‘assessments.’
Honesty or integrity assessments in employment environments may even be mistakenly referred to as “personality
surveys.” They are not the same as personality preference classifiers. The actual preference classifiers also can be
labeled questionnaires, indicators, classifiers, sorters, or profilers.
All of them have
one direction in common—to provide self-insight, explore values, and reveal habits of how people take in information,
process data, and make decisions. Workplace violence is on the upswing,
with one out of five deaths in the workplace caused by assaults or self-inflicted injuries in California alone due to violence,
according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistic’s 2005 census.
Can corporate personality questionnaires help prevent some types of workplace violence? Corporations administer personality
assessments indirectly to help prevent injuries on the job due to anger management problems.
***
Press
Release
EMPLOYMENT
PERSONALITY TESTS DECODED
By Anne Hart with George Sheldon
At least 30 percent
of American companies, from American Express and Bank of America and IBM to Marriott, Procter & Gamble, Time Warner, and
a host of smaller firms, subject their employees to one or more personality tests each year.
Why do they do it? Employers
want to hire and retain employees who are qualified, confident, resilient, even-tempered, and loyal. Personality assessments,
like coaches, help them identify potential problems. The corporate world is intense. Employers need to know how their staff
will deal with the inevitable pull of priorities between a regimented corporate life and family responsibilities.
Employment
Personality Tests Decoded (Career Press, July 2007, $16.99) will show you:
* Why corporations require tests.
*
Details of the most popular tests.
* How to prepare for each type of test and assess your score.
* What good (positive)
attitudes employers want to see on personality assessments and profiles.
* How to solve problems, get results, and simplify
answers for clarity.
* Your legal rights when taking corporate personality assessments.
* How to ace team-building and
leadership assessments, even under stress.
Under normal conditions--and under stress--how do you deal with conflicts,
solve problems, and arrive at results? Will you overlook important details? Find it difficult to interact with your colleagues?
Disrupt a team? Threaten your supervisor?
Employers care how you make sense of the world because they want you to be
reliable-as reliable as the test they're subjecting you to. You will be hired--or retained--because the test shows you will
pose the least financial risk to your employer.
Can these tests be "beaten"? The short answer is no. But you can certainly
learn more about them and, based on that knowledge, have a better idea of the answers each test is looking for.
With
Employment Personality Tests Decoded, you'll never again have to worry that you will fail to get the job
you want--or keep the job you love-because you couldn't pass the personality test!
Employment Personality
Tests Decoded
Anne Hart with George Sheldon
Career Press
July 2007
$16.99; Softcover
ISBN: 978-1564149466
(1564149463
