Risk & Business Magazine Miller Winter 2019 | Page 24

PERSONALITY TESTS
PERSONALITY TESTS
Are Scams In Selection … And Here Are Two Great Solutions, Free.
BY: BRAD SMART
Q
UESTION: 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.
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.
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
24
SOLUTION 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 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!
SOLUTION 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.
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. +