I don’t know how people interpret results from personality tests which gives them a criterion for what constitutes a good hire. However I have a strong feeling

I don’t know how people interpret results from personality tests which gives them a criterion for what constitutes a good hire. However I have a strong feeling there is no sound science behind whichever criteria recruiters are using. And that risks placing arbitrarily high weights on whichever traits correlate with your in-group. This, however, is a falsifiable claim, and if anyone has ever done research which shows that personality tests actually reduces bias (as opposed to enhances it) then I’m open to be proven wrong. I do also question the efficacy of using personality tests as a tool to scope for good hires. How do companies actually measure that? There are so many biases that comes to mind that could make a company overvalue the efficacy of these tests. My critique applies for all theories of personality. I don’t see personality traits as a useful categorization to predict behavior. By far the most research I see in personality psychology is about correlation with other terms inside a very narrow scope (this also applies other sub-fields of psychometrics; including positive psychology). The behavior that personality tests predicts does not further our understanding of the human mind. A theory of behavior that fails to do that is a poor theory at best. But I want to go further, I don’t claim that personality psychology is just poor science but pseudo-science. >> there is no justification for the operationally defined terms The personality traits in the big-5 are operationally defined. That is they are defined in terms of what the tools are designed to detect. This is useful inside your models (as evidence by the success of big-5) but this does not tell us anything outside of our model. Now if you go to the real world and find evidence that these terms exist outside of your model, then I would change my mind. That would be a pretty good grounds for a theory which describes something that your model predicts accurately. If you don’t then you have at most a useful construct that you can use in other theories (think atom before they proved it’s existence). IF you can’t even use your constructs outside of your scope, then there is not much value in it outside of a narrow scope and you are most likely doing pseudo-science. My critique actually extends to all personality traits. Personality traits (if they exist) can at best describe a proportion of the variability within a narrow scope. Outside of that narrow scope it is actually just better to describe a person as calm and courteous as opposed to speculate where they stand in the agreeableness axis in the Big-5 personality trait. And this is what I mean when I say “lack of justification”. ‘Agreeableness’ has been operationally defined within a certain model. When you use it elsewhere you need to justify doing so. And there should probably be a scientific consensus about whether the justification is good enough. If not you are most likely doing pseudo-science