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You can take it here: https://fedexdataworksprod.traitify.com/assessment/31449c4a-2abe-42d1-b96c-38403abc5b23?survey_type=PERSONALITY https://fedexdataworksprod

• carabiner 3y ago
  Asking "Are you a good/bad person?" in 10 different ways... Does this test have much value?
• vundercind 3y ago
  I’m convinced most use of these is actually testing for: 1) bright enough to answer to achieve just about any desired outcome (usually not a high bar), 2) socially/politically aware enough to realize which outcomes will be good, and which will be bad; and, 3) agreeable/compliant enough to go ahead and game the quiz to achieve a good outcome without raising a fuss.
  • bluefirebrand 3y ago
    It seems to me that what you are getting is people who are both decently clever and fairly dishonest. Which is an awful combination to select for, imo
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
      Not clever honest people are taken advantage of Not clever dishonest people can do ok sometimes Clever honest people can be moderately successful, but can always be out-maneuvered by the clever dishonest people, thereby limiting how high they can climb, Clever dishonest people rule the world.
      • glitchc 3y ago
        So true. How does one become dishonest?
        • saagarjha 3y ago
          I can tell you how.
        • vundercind 3y ago
          Compartmentalizing by treating business as a “game” that honest people are simply playing poorly seems to be a place many start, if they want to be able to continue to see themselves as honest. Once it’s just a game, and deception is part of it… why, you’re not even behaving unethically!
        • johnnyanmac 3y ago
          Empathy. Remove it. Don't necessarily steal willy nilly, but see people as pawns on a board to get you to the next stage of the game. You're not concerned with doing a good job, you're concerned with learning the players; their personality, their weaknesses, the power structure, etc. Your goal is to move up the ladder and move quick. Get friendly with boss, the hold it over them. then get to the next step. maybe you need to pretend to fit in, maybe lie about qualifications. That's part of the board. Get powerful people to like you, get powerful tools and resources, and keep moving up. Many stop around middle management since you start to need more money to push further, but it's a similar game as you go farther up, you just end up fighting against more players that may or may not be cleverer than yourself (and likely much more dishonest).
          • Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
            It seems you have given this considerable thought...
        • tsegratis 3y ago
          I like how that is already impossible, and that in only two sentences > So true.... Become dishonest Win the second, will loose the first
    • ipaddr 3y ago
      Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the rules isn't dishonest. You'd rather clever enough but defiant employees? Or not clever and some other combo? Being honest is realizing your situation and making tradeoffs to prioritize what's important. Pretending that your ability to call out weaknesses in the interview process makes you the best candidate is dishonest. If you feel that's more important you are forgetting why you are part of this process in the first place. If the outcome is they get a better interview process because of your feedback but you don't get the role, you failed in your original purpose. You need to be honest with yourself why you even applied in the first place.
      • Vegenoid 3y ago
        > Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the rules isn't dishonest. Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you truly feel or believe is dishonest. I don't think it's an amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to play this dumb game. There are many cases where being untruthful is not morally wrong. > Being honest is realizing your situation and making tradeoffs to prioritize what's important. I wouldn't say that's 'being honest', it's being pragmatic.
        • bluefirebrand 3y ago
          > Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you truly feel or believe is dishonest. I don't think it's an amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to play this dumb game. There are many cases where being untruthful is not morally wrong Thank you for this reply, I couldn't have said it better. It's important that people realize 1) Representing yourself falsely is dishonest 2) Dishonesty isn't an especially bad thing in many cases. In fact it's socially expected in many cases, such as in interviews. That doesn't make it less dishonest. It means that a lot of our society is an engine that basically runs on dishonesty.
          • vundercind 3y ago
            It took me a while to get that interviewers aren’t really looking for honesty when they ask stuff like “why do you want to work here?” I mean maybe they are, but they’re gonna be very unhappy with the most-honest answer from 95+% of candidates for the vast majority of employers and jobs. So of course, you’re supposed to be… quite a bit less honest. And I guess maybe there’s some value in filtering out people who don’t get that? Or who refuse to “play ball” on principle? IDK the reasons, I didn’t make the rules. I was raised with and internalized honesty as very important, and adjusting to an adult world (mostly—almost entirely, actually—the business world) in which that needed to be judiciously tempered and certain kinds of dishonesty were expected and failure to play along punished, was quite a damn shock. I adjusted eventually but I’ve never really been happy about it.
    • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      maybe I'm cynical but I think it's selecting for moderately or reasonably dishonest, the dishonesty of the median. I think you'd have to be extremely honest to think huh, this is an absolutely bullshit test that if I answer honestly on just this part here means I won't get the job I want (assuming that you are only bad on a single metric) but I am going to answer honestly no matter what. Hmm, but maybe they have that baked into the test!? If you slightly fail one of the bad metrics and none of the others they rate you super honest and hire you immediately! Science says we should definitely try to figure this out.
      • bluefirebrand 3y ago
        > maybe I'm cynical but I think it's selecting for moderately or reasonably dishonest, the dishonesty of the median I feel like that's accurate. After all, I did describe it as "fairly" dishonest, not "very" or "extremely" dishonest. Lying on personality tests is definitely an average, socially expected amount of dishonesty.
        • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
          OK I had read fairly as being significantly above average, thus my response.
    • silisili 3y ago
      I've thought this of every personality test a job has offered. And in my experience it was never even a good job giving it - the last one I took was for a beer delivery driver 20 years ago. The tests are usually so obvious, too. Like three awful traits and one good one. Coincidentally(or not?) I was rejected for that job for scoring too high overall - they said there's no way I'd stick around long, and they were absolutely right.
    • kube-system 3y ago
      Does social filtering constitute dishonesty or professionalism? This question itself might be a good interview question.
      • Brananarchy 3y ago
        Both. The entire concept of "professionalism" is based around the idea that certain people should be dishonest about themselves in public, for the sake of others' comfort.
        • JohnFen 3y ago
          I entirely disagree with that being what the concept of "professionalism" is based on, but I'm also not entirely sure what you're alluding to here, so grain of salt.
          • Brananarchy 3y ago
            Primarily, I'm alluding to it being considered "unprofessional" for queer people to be themselves in the workplace, as that is the particular thorn I've been pricked with. But there are other fun ways "professionalism" has been used to oppress people - from the way Women are expected to dress, to Black hair being treated as unacceptable.
            • deleted 3y ago
              [deleted]
            • JohnFen 3y ago
              OK, so you aren't really talking about professionalism. You're talking about people using a phony excuse to enable outright discrimination -- which is itself very unprofessional behavior.
        • kube-system 3y ago
          If someone isn't capable of being honest without making their coworkers socially uncomfortable, I don't think the honesty is a redeeming quality.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • duped 3y ago
    I really think in the best case, it's someone in charge of adding criteria to hiring decisions and they pick a personality test as a way to measure and fit a candidate into some box they've arbitrarily chosen for a role. In the worst case they're filtering out neurodivergent people but can't say that because it's illegal. They'll make up reasons like you're listing, but there's not much evidence to the efficacy of these test at evaluating those criteria. Like 20 years ago, a company was taken to the cleaners because they used a test used by psychologists to evaluate mental health as a personality test in hiring. Now, people who make/use these tests are careful to only use them in ways that healthcare professionals don't. A side effect of that is that any test that would be useful for reliably measuring a candidate's personality/mental fitness would also be illegal. So a lot of these tests are bunk to begin with.
  • squeaky-clean 3y ago
    I interviewed at Burger King in college, the manager told me I was the only applicant in their system to get above 80% on the personality test. It was incredibly easy things like, "How many minutes are acceptable to show up late for your shift? 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, being late is unacceptable". Or "If you knew there were no cameras able to see you, and no other employees around, how much money is okay to take from the register? $1, $5, $20, any amount is unacceptable" He said something along the lines of "I know some employees are going to try to steal from the register, but why would they admit that in an interview?
    • ChicagoBoy11 3y ago
      Did you ask to see which questions you supposedly got wrong?
      • inputError 3y ago
        "How much sawdust is legally acceptable to put in the chicken tenders breading? 10%, 25%, 50%, sawdust in the chicken tenders breading is unacceptable". OP put unacceptable but the answer was 25%
      • squeaky-clean 3y ago
        He refused to tell me, but I'm betting it was one about getting called in to work on a day off because someone else called out with no notice.
    • itronitron 3y ago
      "How many questions is it acceptable to lie on when taking a personality test? 10 lies, 5 lies, 2 lies, lying on a personality test is unacceptable."
    • dboreham 3y ago
      Reminds me of the narcissistic personality disorder test which consists of one question: "are you a narcissist?"
      • 3y ago
  • jahewson 3y ago
    I know what you're getting at but you’ll need to define “bright”, “good”, and “bad” first. The whole undertaking seems ill-conceived.
  • gosub100 3y ago
    I think its insurance against discrimination lawsuits. There is no obligation for the employer to reject an application for failing the test, but if an applicant is rejected, there is a good chance they can use the test as something to point to that gave them doubt.
  • cainxinth 3y ago
    This is true of job interviews generally. It’s a game to see if you have enough sense to predict and give answer they want (not the unvarnished truth).
• afandian 3y ago
  You missed “gullible”. They’re selecting for the kind of people who wouldn’t immediately bail when they see this nonsense. Or don’t have much choice.
• schmookeeg 3y ago
  I get an ASMR-like response from taking tests/quizzes, even these sorta pop-psych nonsense ones. Apparently I'm a "mentor" at FedEx. It resonates. :) My current client had me sit one of these after 2 years on the job. That one labeled me "Debater". I argued with them out of principle. I think that if their HR people used it to screen me before I started, I would not have gotten the gig at all. :D
  • dave333 3y ago
    The test is pretty easy to game just by giving answers you think make you a good prospect - traits you would aspire to but don't necessarily achieve. I too got a Mentor rating whereas in reality I am retired and much closer to a lazy shy procrastinating individual contributor who never gets anything done!
    • HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Im pretty sure the test being easy to game is the point. Theyre looking for someone who 1. Knows what the "right" answers are and 2. Is willing to give them whether or not they reflect reality.
    • staticman2 3y ago
      I haven't looked at a corporate personality test since 2008, so this could be way out of date, but sometimes these tests have a trick question to catch people lying on the test. I'm not familiar with this test but some tests will ask something like "sometimes I feel tired" and if you answer "never" the test maker will conclude you are a liar since everyone is sometimes tired.
    • jerf 3y ago
      This is a well-known problem with self-assessments in psychology in general. It isn't that hard for most people to choose to use a persona to provide answers to some quiz, even one quite divergent from their "real" personality (skipping the discussion on what that even is), and for some people with certain conditions it's almost impossible for them not to do this (e.g., the "Cluster B" disorders). Getting past this problem is the major task of creating a standardized assessment that has any value at all. You obviously can't just ask "Hey, are you a homicidal maniac who is unfit to stand trial?" but you also can't ask questions that are really quite obviously just that question in disguise like "If someone flips you off in public, do you think you're justified in immediately murdering them?"... and I exaggerate for effect, but the principle holds true. I'd expect even in the case of this quiz if you told people to affect certain personas you'd find the results statistically-significantly shifted, even if the people involved couldn't tell you any rational reason why they changed their answers based on the persona they affected.
• gnfargbl 3y ago
  Seems like a fairly standard personality test. I just ran through it and got the same kind of answer I usually get on these tests. I don't really see the value in these tests but, apart from the weird avatars, this one seems to be just Myers-Briggs with different words (for me, "thinker" instead of "INTP").
  • Exoristos 3y ago
    It seems fine until you find out that most companies then weed out certain personality types, particulary INTJ. Some companies in retail are even looking for only a few personality types that they think will make these employees easy to manage.
• neilv 3y ago
  Those titles help a lot. I wonder whether the Reddit poster saw titles. With titles, some people will be dim or troubled enough to give the wrong answer on obvious ones, like "Starter Not a Finisher". The right answer on other questions are trickier. Like maybe the company wants a handler of packages to be willing to toss the packages around "Good Enough", and some manager thought some people are a natural at that, and asked for a test to tell them. (Like when a non-technical executive was suggesting that I should give coding exams to senior software engineer candidates, and the strongest point in the argument was "This will tell us whether they do unit tests!") Could titles be tricky, like if "Loves the Social Scene" is paired with image of someone partying hard, so the company might think they'll have hangover absenteeism, OUI, or other risks? Or risk of insubordination, or disruption to the hierarchy? A self-image of "Natural Leader" in a worker-bee role could be seen as problematic by a simple-minded company. Maybe Fedex is gathering data on which combinations of answers predict a unionizing troublemaker. Or, in the scenario that a shop floor employee is injured, which employees are going to be murmuring about it with others, speaking with investigator, etc. If a company wants to be especially evil about it, some of these questions might be good for weeding out candidates with depression. Or for arguing pre-existing condition, if an employee later claims that working conditions caused mental anguish. Then there's the meta of filtering out people who are alienated by this test, or who are not captive. Especially with the odd images in this test, I think many candidates with self-respect and other options will simply walk away. It's not like Leetcode hazings, where they've been conditioned since school that this is just the ritual you do to get that very-well-paying FAANG job. This is some different thing, to which you're submitting for a chance to work at FedEx. What other possibilities? Some of that could be useful to a company, if not very ethically. Also, maybe this was sold to the company as more than it is, based on flawed or fabricated psychological research.
  • ezfe 3y ago
    They did NOT see the titles, as shown in the screenshot and mentioned in the comments on the Reddit post. They weren't visible on their phone.
  • corobo 3y ago
    I swear Firefox (iOS, so could be a WebKit thing?) starts tabs scrolled down below the page header recently. Definitely happens on HN now and then (although typically I can't recreate it right now..) pretty sure I've seen it elsewhere too. I wonder if that is a) actually true browser behaviour and not something the site itself is doing (or something I've managed to make up) b) if a is true, the reason it hid the kinda-header-looking text representation of the images from OP Unfortunately I'm at a loss for the keywords to search to confirm this behaviour, I'm only able to find unrelated scroll/header results
• ezfe 3y ago
  Yup, seems like either their browser or the apps CSS is causing those not to show up for them. Without those titles the test is nonsense.
• duskwuff 3y ago
  > Each one has a title The OP of the Reddit thread didn't see the titles, and was instructed to "look at the images and go with your gut". For the record, I don't have blue skin and hair, so I'd be inclined to answer "not me" for all of them.
• cebert 3y ago
  I thought this was ridiculous as an interview screening process. However, since you shared the test, I took it and I’m not sure it’s too unreasonable. I felt like it’s determination of me as a mentor was quite accurate.
  • alephxyz 3y ago
    Giving a personality test in a competitive context where it's expected that some traits are valued more than others makes the results void. It's a good example of goodhart's law. Why would you let a potential employer know you're neurotic or disagreeable?
• Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  Needs a login at the moment though?
  • fransje26 3y ago
    Too many HN requests.. :-)
• AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  So, guessing: Two Drinks - Frequently Change My Mind Laptop Screen - "Hard to Start a New Task" Painting - Easily Offended Couch Happy/Sad - "Tend to Feel Sad" Sculpture Yawn - Art Isnt My Thing Four Stars - "Good Enough" Puzzle - Starter Not a Finisher Flower - Unstoppable Clock - "Always Wonder Why" Gift - "Make Friends Everywhere" Superhero - Natural Leader Talking during Party - Chats in Elevators Tweezers - "attention to detail" type of thing Couch Laundry Basket - "Not My Job" Hands in the Air - "Loves the Social Scene" Pizza Glutton - Sometimes Thoughtless Hike/Cook/Skydive - ... probably "adventurous" or fearless or like that Fruit vs Donut - "Volunteering" Close park - "Believe the Best of People
  • rvba 3y ago
    > Superhero - Natural Leader Management and HR claims to want those, until they actually get one
    • corobo 3y ago
      Hah, true. Feels like a superhero slash leader might be the type to realise they and their fellow workers can get the results they want if they work as a union
• user_7832 3y ago
  Am I missing something, or is it geolocked outside the US? I just get a login page.
  • xeromal 3y ago
    I think someone caught the issue and blocked it. It opened for me earlier today.
    • user_7832 3y ago
      Ah, thanks. Anyway I've done those tests myself too so no great loss.
• m463 3y ago
  "Easily Offended" -> posts on reddit on the other hand, there could be a reverse personality test for the company "Sociopath", "Perfectionist", "All about me", "Unrealistic Expectations", "Rude to the waiter", "Excessive Bureaucracy", "Easily Offends"...
• jimjimjim 3y ago
  I know which answers they want but more then half of those are not me. How should I answer? I'm surprised they don't have tests with "Prone to stabbing people" or "Likes doing work".
• mFixman 3y ago
  Don't all of these have obvious right answers? What's the point of these if 99% of the people would choose the same?