It Is in Your Head
The next time you go on a job interview, in addition to the usual "why do you want to work here?" discussions, be prepared for questions that are a little odd. For example, would you describe yourself as direct, gregarious, patient, or accurate? Or, to what degree do you agree with the statement, "I take things as they come, rather than think ahead a lot"?
If it seems like psycho-babble, well, it is. The use of these kinds of behavioral or personality assessments, which ebbs and flows along with other corporate trends, is on the rise again.
In March 2005, more than a third of employers surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management were giving job candidates personality tests, with more planning to start in the coming year. And 36 percent more were formally testing employees for organizational fit by assessing things like team-orientation, entrepreneurial inclinations, and comfort with a "traditional" work environment.
One reason these tests are back in vogue, according to executives who use them, is that the more sophisticated ones have become increasingly accurate and adaptable to different industries and job descriptions. "You can have a database full of the traits of salespeople who are successful and match a candidate for a sales position against that," explains Luis Valdes, executive consultant at Corporate Psychology Resources in Atlanta. And technology has made the tests easy and cheap to administer. The giant retailer Best Buy even includes a personality assessment in its online job application.
Mind games. Additionally, in a buyers' job market, employers don't mind putting candidates through these extra paces, which they believe break through the upbeat, earnest, and diligent facade everyone puts on for job interviews to ferret out a person's true work style and inclinations.
"You don't need to face an Enron-size problem," says Willard Lewis, CEO of One Georgia Bank in Atlanta and a big believer in assessment tests. "If you have one employee who's not getting done what he's supposed to and hiding his work in a drawer instead of telling someone, for a financial institution that could be problematic." Lewis has nixed candidates because a personality test indicated they weren't "as motivated as I would have liked."
Applicants for lower-level jobs are likely to sit in front of a computer for 20 minutes to an hour to answer multiple-choice questions that will tell employers whether they are suitably outgoing for a salesclerk position, or if they deflect stress well enough to last long in a call center. High-level executives are likely to take a similar test as part of a battery of diagnostics that could include a chat with a psychologist and other assessments. "We're trying to literally get at how a person is hard-wired," says Valdes. "We want to get at how they think, what motivates them, how self-aware they are, their emotional intelligence, their work style, and how they use certain skills in certain situations."
Richard Carlton, who has taken an assessment test for four different jobs, including his current one as chief lending officer at One Georgia Bank, received a copy of the results from his latest test, which read like an annual job review, summing up the strengths he had that were important to the job and pointing out skills or personality traits his boss wanted him to work on. The company asked him to keep it around as a sort of road map for his career development. "It's not quite constructive criticism, but it's something to think about," he says.
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