PERSONALIT Y TESTS
PERSONALITY TESTS
ARE SCAMS IN SELECTION
… AND HERE ARE TWO GREAT SOLUTIONS, FREE
QUESTION: BRAD, I’ve taken personality tests and my spouse says
they are quite accurate. Why shouldn’t I use them in selection?
Answer: Because a) you KNOW from experience your hiring has not
improved using them and I know, from properly validating them that if
your test has a cutoff score that eliminates candidates who score below
it, that test eliminates as many A Players as C Players. are straight as a pencil from lower left to upper right, Brad Smart is full of
BS – the test is valid in a USEFUL way! But you’ll see the dots in a perfect
circle, showing it has zero practical validity. Look at who would have been
eliminated by the cutoff score: I’ll bet you’ll see as many As as Cs would
have been eliminated. Thankfully you did NOT use that test and eliminate
candidates for six months!
Is this you? Do more than half the people you hire turn out to
disappoint you? You are sure some mis-hires have conned you, am I right?
So, you try to find a screening tool – something to cut down the number
of resumes to a few candidates you can interview. And what do you find?
Many managers screen candidates using personality tests, a $4 billion
industry, including the money they have taken from you. Too bad – you
got conned by the personality testing companies. To clarify: There are
a lot of good ability and knowledge tests. But every personality test I’ve
properly validated has flunked. Solution No. 2: Free: Without the personality tests, here is a time-
tested suggestion for screening candidates, and it’s 1,000 times more
valuable than personality tests and … it’s free: email candidates a
“truth serum” saying, Thank you for your interest in the (sales rep) job at
ACME. We’d like to continue the hiring process but want to be sure you’re
okay with our policy: a final step in hiring is for candidates (that’s you) to
arrange reference calls with managers. If you’re okay with this, reply and
we’ll be in touch. Low performers, who are the BSers, drop out so you
now have mostly the sharp, honest candidates to interview. Hundreds of
companies have used it. The most famous is General Electric under Jack
Welch in the 1990s … and GE became the most valuable company in the
world and the most respected.
Solution No. 1: Test the Test: This is what I did with 10,000 candidates
for jobs in one of the big box retailers. It took two years and cost $100k,
but you can do it easily at your company. Administer the personality test
to all candidates (BEFORE they are hired, so a lot will fake their answers),
don’t score the test, put away the tests for six months, score them, and
make a simple chart: on the vertical axis show Performance Rating and
on the horizontal axis put the test score with the cutoff score. If the dots
Wow – this solution solves two big hiring problems: candidate
dishonesty and lack of verification. The truth serum and your talking
with the managers when your finalists arrange the calls will be the best
verification of what candidates said.
Brad Smart
Dr. Brad Smart is an internationally renowned management psychologist and is generally regarded
as the world’s leading expert on hiring best practices. He has written five books on hiring including
the New York Times/Wall Street Journal best seller Topgrading: third Edition. Topgrading methods
have enabled hundreds of small companies and leading companies such as General Electric, American
Heart Association, and Barclays to more than triple their success hiring high performers.
topgrading.com
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