7 ms·

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) soc

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
      - glitchc 3y ago
        I think that's it really. You give up a great deal. Dishonest people don't realize how much they've given up. They surround themselves with equally dishonest people, and then wonder why they can't trust anyone.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    A small percentage of "clever dishonest people" rule the world. Unless one hits the stratosphere quickly there will be a downfall, because time is the enemy of major dishonesty. In other words, most of the world-ruling class are dishonest, but most dishonest people (even clever ones) are not world rulers.
  - woobar 3y ago
    An alternative take from Venkatesh Rao managed two narrow it down just to 3 types of people in his Gervais Principle [1] [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  - strken 3y ago
    Compulsively dishonest people don't rule the world at all. If you can't resist stealing petty cash from the Burger King till then you'll eventually be found out and slapped down. 99% honest people rule the world because of the sneaky 1% of cases where they cheat and make it count.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >the sneaky 1% of cases where they cheat and make it count. I'd count that under "clever but dishonest". I do agree most people aren't clever, but enough are.
- 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).

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
    - glitchc 3y ago
      I think that's it really. You give up a great deal. Dishonest people don't realize how much they've given up. They surround themselves with equally dishonest people, and then wonder why they can't trust anyone.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  A small percentage of "clever dishonest people" rule the world. Unless one hits the stratosphere quickly there will be a downfall, because time is the enemy of major dishonesty. In other words, most of the world-ruling class are dishonest, but most dishonest people (even clever ones) are not world rulers.
- woobar 3y ago
  An alternative take from Venkatesh Rao managed two narrow it down just to 3 types of people in his Gervais Principle [1] [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- strken 3y ago
  Compulsively dishonest people don't rule the world at all. If you can't resist stealing petty cash from the Burger King till then you'll eventually be found out and slapped down. 99% honest people rule the world because of the sneaky 1% of cases where they cheat and make it count.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >the sneaky 1% of cases where they cheat and make it count. I'd count that under "clever but dishonest". I do agree most people aren't clever, but enough are.
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).