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Personality Tests Don't Belong In Job Interviews

Beekey Cheung on September 30, 2019

I find it distressing that more and more companies using personality tests in their interview process. My colleagues mentioned that they have seen ...
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jessiedotjs profile image
jessie.js

Will a candidate get along with people?

I've worked with a few people who got along with everyone, except for the women on the team. I'm not sure how you test for this in an interview. While I don't like personality tests (and in fact have dropped out of interviewing in response to being asked to take one), a more subjective approach has its own flaws. Whether that's hiring someone who doesn't get along with women, or not hiring someone of a different background because you don't click with them as fast as you do someone of your own background.

I do like your approach of testing for personality in a more technical setting. Rather than just trying to get along with someone, you see how they respond to technical problems with the assumption that their ability to handle technical conflict will carry over to their ability to handle social conflict.

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pbeekums profile image
Beekey Cheung

You bring up an excellent point. People will definitely act differently in different contexts, such as talking to women vs talking to men. There are so many to try out though, different races, different age groups, or even different regions of the same country. It is incredibly difficult to test out all those contexts without having them work at the company for months. Even then, you may not have someone on the existing team with a certain background. And then you'll only find out someone you've hired has conflicts later on.

I don't have a perfect answer here. I don't think a personality test will solve this problem because what would the abstract question be? "Do you hate people of X?" It would probably be more subtle, but most people would understand what the question would try to get at and provide an answer they think is acceptable rather than an honest one.

Part of me has wishful thinking in knowing that software development is a pragmatic endeavor. I'd like to think that the best developers focus on that pragmatism and know logically that they should focus on what a person can do rather than that person's background.

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jessiedotjs profile image
jessie.js

Yeah, it's definitely impractical to have the candidate sit down with someone from every background. Not to mention that puts an undue burden on minorities (if 2% of your company is black and you want a black engineer on every interview slate, you're asking them to spend significantly more of their time interviewing than anyone else). I don't have an answer.

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blindfish3 profile image
Ben Calder

I keep seeing these posts complaining about the interview process and I'm surprised I haven't yet seen one suggestion for an obvious approach to determining a candidate's technical AND inter-personal skills: i.e. code review.

Why not present a candidate with a PR with some code/style errors etc. and ask them to do a code review. You'll establish their ability to spot issues in code and you'll get an impression of how they communicate with their peers. You'll also get some sense of their professional experience: e.g. if they clearly understand the code-review process; if they can spot things that could cause long-term problems etc.

I wouldn't see lack of code-review experience as being a blocker to hiring someone - they may simply not yet have worked somewhere with established good practice - but I do think it's a way of presenting code 'challenges' that are much closer to real-world scenarios.

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pbeekums profile image
Beekey Cheung

I agree about the need to test technical and inter-personal skills, which is why I described using an open ended architecture/design problem to do so.

I disagree that a code review is as good. Discussing how code should be structured and the trade offs of various decisions is more representative of technical skill than catching style errors.

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blindfish3 profile image
Ben Calder

I don't agree that code review is simply about catching style errors: that's what linters and tools like Prettier automate for you. Amongst other things code review should definitely be looking at how coding decisions conform to architecture/design goals.

We at least both agree that using real-world scenarios is a better approach than personality tests and abstract code problems :)

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jessiedotjs profile image
jessie.js

I interviewed at Slack recently and literally part of the interview was doing a code review. I don't have any insight into how they reviewed it and how it factored into a hiring decision, but I thought it was incredibly smart.

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pbeekums profile image
Beekey Cheung

The ironic thing is that one goal of a personality test would be to filter out sociopaths. But a sociopath is going to be capable of manipulating their answers of a personality test to "pass".

I'm disappointed to hear that about ThoughtWorks. Up until now I have only heard good things about them. I'm glad you were in a position to cancel an interview. Those of us in that position are the most able in rejecting poor hiring practices.

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zchtodd profile image
zchtodd

I've experienced the personality test phenomenon myself, but it was very clearly an IQ test. They just can't call it an IQ test, because that's illegal, at least in the United States.

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pbeekums profile image
Beekey Cheung

That's awful. I can only hope good candidates refuse to work for that company.