When I was a teenager I took a personality test as a requirement for employment at a retail clothing store. I didn’t take it too seriously, I “failed” it and that was the end of my application. How do these tests work and how to you pass or fail them? Is there evidence that these tests can actually predict certain behaviors?
You cannot fail a personality test unless the person administering the test wants to filter out specific personality types that are similar to yours, for a process unrelated to the test itself (e.g. employment).
The thing is, most possible personalities seem to be considered undesirable by employers, and so many people simply resort to lying on these tests to present a favourable image to employers (basically: extrovert, conformist, “positive”/upbeat/optimistic, ambitious, responsible etc.). Looks like employers know about this, but don’t care anyway, because they think that if you aren’t willing to mold yourself into somebody else for the sake of the job, then you don’t want the job enough and there are many others who do.
(Disclaimer: I’m an outsider to the employment process and might not know what I’m talking about. My impressions are gathered from job interview advice and job descriptions.)
You might be interested in the [Big Five] model of personality, which seems to be a rough scientific consensus, and is better empirically supported than other models. In particular, measures of conscientiousness have a relatively strong predictive value for things like grades, unemployment, crime, income, etc. Myers-Briggs-style tests that sort people into buckets (“You’re an extrovert! You’re an introvert!”) are more common but don’t seem to have a much predictive value except insofar as they reduce to something like the Big Five model.
However, from what I remember of applying to crappy jobs, you may not have taken a real test. I remember normal sounding items like, “I prefer large groups to small groups”, mixed in with “trick” questions like, “If I saw my best friend stealing from the cash register, I would report him/her”. I assume you got those right. Either way, you’re expected to just lie and say you’d be the perfect, most hard-working employee ever and that cleaning toilets/selling shoes/washing cars is what you’ve dreamed of doing since you were five.
I’ve heard (second-hand, but the original source was a counselor for job-finding) that a trick for passing those, if it’s a test that offers options from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”, is to always pick one of the polarized ends (“Strongly” either). The idea seems to be that they’ll prefer candidates who are less washy, have stronger convictions, etc.
When I was a teenager I took a personality test as a requirement for employment at a retail clothing store. I didn’t take it too seriously, I “failed” it and that was the end of my application. How do these tests work and how to you pass or fail them? Is there evidence that these tests can actually predict certain behaviors?
You cannot fail a personality test unless the person administering the test wants to filter out specific personality types that are similar to yours, for a process unrelated to the test itself (e.g. employment).
The thing is, most possible personalities seem to be considered undesirable by employers, and so many people simply resort to lying on these tests to present a favourable image to employers (basically: extrovert, conformist, “positive”/upbeat/optimistic, ambitious, responsible etc.). Looks like employers know about this, but don’t care anyway, because they think that if you aren’t willing to mold yourself into somebody else for the sake of the job, then you don’t want the job enough and there are many others who do.
(Disclaimer: I’m an outsider to the employment process and might not know what I’m talking about. My impressions are gathered from job interview advice and job descriptions.)
You might be interested in the [Big Five] model of personality, which seems to be a rough scientific consensus, and is better empirically supported than other models. In particular, measures of conscientiousness have a relatively strong predictive value for things like grades, unemployment, crime, income, etc. Myers-Briggs-style tests that sort people into buckets (“You’re an extrovert! You’re an introvert!”) are more common but don’t seem to have a much predictive value except insofar as they reduce to something like the Big Five model.
However, from what I remember of applying to crappy jobs, you may not have taken a real test. I remember normal sounding items like, “I prefer large groups to small groups”, mixed in with “trick” questions like, “If I saw my best friend stealing from the cash register, I would report him/her”. I assume you got those right. Either way, you’re expected to just lie and say you’d be the perfect, most hard-working employee ever and that cleaning toilets/selling shoes/washing cars is what you’ve dreamed of doing since you were five.
I’ve heard (second-hand, but the original source was a counselor for job-finding) that a trick for passing those, if it’s a test that offers options from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”, is to always pick one of the polarized ends (“Strongly” either). The idea seems to be that they’ll prefer candidates who are less washy, have stronger convictions, etc.