Psychometric assessments are a well-established method of gauging how well job seekers will suit a job vacancy and fit into your team, and they are often used post hiring to understand how well teams work together.
Allegedly based on psychological research, psychometric assessment vendors claim to provide an objective, data-driven and scientific way of measuring soft skills, aptitudes and behaviours. It is claimed that they add value to the recruitment process, reducing the time spent interviewing candidates who are not equipped for the role and reducing employee turnover.
But do the claims made by psychometric test vendors stand up to scrutiny? There are many who think they are more pseudoscience than science and about as reliable at forecasting your personality type as astrology is at forecasting your future.
Soft skill analysis has become an increasingly important part of the candidate assessment process. Knowing whether the candidate has the right qualifications and experience to meet the hard skill criteria for the role is one thing. But, in addition to determining whether the candidate can do the job, most employers also want to know whether the candidate fits into the culture of their business: Is this someone I want to work with? It’s tempting, therefore, to put your faith in well-established psychometric assessment vendors, especially when they are embedded across multiple industries, including banking and finance, legal, the public sector and the armed forces. A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 18% of companies use them, a number that is growing by 10% to 15% per year.
Psychometric assessment in a business context has its origins in the 1940s when Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) questionnaire. Though they had no formal training, Briggs and her daughter based their test on the theories of the well-respected Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung using four opposing psychological dimensions:
- Extraversion versus introversion
- Sensing versus intuition
- Thinking versus feeling
- Perceiving versus judging
Unfortunately, the MBTI has repeatedly failed attempts to affirm its validity. In 1960, the US Educational Testing Service concluded the MBTI is “without psychometric merit.” Perhaps it is no surprise that something as complex as human personality cannot be gauged based on a narrow range of artificial binaries calculated from a series of self-reported answers to 90-plus “forced-choice” questions. If human personality could really be calculated in such a way, it could equally provide a fail-safe method for dating, marriage and global conflict resolution, not just assessing fitness for work. Nevertheless, we continue to live in a world filled with bad hires, bad dates, divorce and war.
The absence of evidence for its effectiveness has, however, proven no barrier to the test’s adoption. Today, the MBTI is the most popular personality test in the world, taken by more than two million people annually. Its distributor, Consulting Psychologists Press Inc., leads a market in psychological testing worth an estimated $2 billion a year, and the company’s website boasts the assessment has a 90% accuracy rating and a 90% average test-retest correlation, making it “one of the most reliable and accurate personality assessments available.”
Psychometric Assessments Landscape
The MBTI has subsequently spawned hundreds of imitators and competitors, all vying for the attention of the busy recruiter. Wellknown examples include Big Five, Birkman Method, DiSC, Enneagram, Eysenck Personality Inventory, Four Colours, Goleman EQ, Hexaco, High5, Holland Code (Riasec) and Thomas International. All make claims regarding their scientific validity and reliability. Artificial intelligence has started to be incorporated into some of the more advanced assessments, providing an additional veneer of credibility. Some vendors incorporate a blend of psychometric models.
Truity offers access to five different personality tests, while Paradox Traitify validates against the Big Five and Holland Code using inter- action with images. Clients include EY and Deloitte, while integration partners include AMS, Beeline, icims, Monster, Phenom, Smart Recruiters, Success Factors and Taleo.
An alternative to question-based models is Pymetrics, which uses AI-based games to measure 91 personality traits. Its clients include JP Morgan, BCG, Morgan Stanley and AstraZeneca. In response to the recent growth in remote working, SHL has developed a RemoteWorkQ assessment, which measures “nine workforce behaviours critical to remote employee management,” including the ability to stay focused and adapt to change. Whether psychometric assessments are hokum or not, it is argued that the results can be used during interviews to engage candidates into opening up about their attitudes and aptitudes. This may be so. However, whether individuals are self-aware enough and honest enough about their own personality is questionable, especially during a high-pressure situation like a job interview where everyone makes a deliberate effort to put their very best self forward.
We live in a complicated world, and while it may be tempting to cull candidates from shortlists by trying to categorise their personality types, such labelling can end up narrowing interviewers’ perceptions and limiting candidates’ real potential. It can also lead to more negative outcomes.
In the HBO documentary “Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests,” autistic disability rights activist Lydia X. Z. Brown says, “Personality tests are by and large constructed to be ableist, to be racist, to be sexist and to be classist. That’s what happens when you have a test … based on norms devised from college-educated straight white men with no known disabilities. Personality tests are useful for individual people sometimes on journeys of self-discovery. But when they’re used to make decisions by other people affecting someone’s life, they become dangerous tools.”
Humans have evolved to be pattern-seeking animals and try to avoid making decisions when they are exposed to chaos and chance. But this can also make us susceptible to seeing patterns where no pattern exists. This tendency has a name — “patternicity” — the finding of meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Good interview techniques, thorough reference checking and objective skills testing can go a long way to validate candidate fit. If you want to go beyond that, make sure that you are not making hiring decisions based on — and paying good money for — meaningless noise.
