The how-to book titled, Employment
Personality
Tests Decoded by Anne Hart with George Sheldon, Career Press, 2007, offers expert advice on how to prepare yourself for every kind of employment personality or cognitive test and give your present or potential employer the answers they want as well as sample
assessments you can self-score. The book discusses why
corporations administer personality tests and includes interviews with those who administer and/or design the tests.
Personality tests are given for three reasons. To hire the employee who poses the least financial risk to the corporation is the primary reason why corporations give tests. A secondary reason is to find ways to improve decision-making skills under reduced time pressure among executives and to improve team-building strategies. A third reason is to help cut down measurable increasing violence in the workplace by better screening.
Employers are afraid of hiring liars, bullies, and loose cannons that can’t connect with other works and fit into the group or make good decisions under pressure and work well with teams. Whereas corporations are expected by law to hire and accommodate people with disabilities if they can do the required job tasks, employers don’t want disruptive, violent people in the workplaces.
The trouble is corporate testing can’t screen out the potentially violent partners, relatives, and spouses of workers. A sore point is whether to hire a depressed worker who put on the charm at work but could turn violent under pressure in the future. The big question is ‘could’. So corporations want to cut risk and increase assurance with employees. Employees want to feel safe from fellow co-workers.
Employers need but don’t yet have a flawless system with time-tested rules to screen and train workers at all levels. Test designers have a mission, to find the flaws in the tests and to build into tests alarms that recognize ‘lies’ on the answer sheets.
The exordial and sometimes hidden reasons for giving certain types of personality profiling, integrity, and anger assessments is that some corporate questionnaires with built-in ‘lie’ alarms may help screen out potentially disruptive, angry, dishonest, or violent employees in an indirect way without the test-taker knowing it. Some tests seek insight into a worker’s values, integrity, and loyalty.
Corporations want to prescind (withdraw) attention to screening out bullies that assault and focus on testing for self-insight and honesty. Employers care how workers solve conflicts because they have to pay insurance premiums whenever a worker has to make an impact on co-workers or supervisors or bosses begin to harass or intimidate workers because they think they can.
The ultimate goal of the assessment is to find out how employees can avoid conflict and miscommunication by seeking self-insight from the testing. At the same time a test should help save time, increase production levels, revenues, and employee turnover, including down time due to employee conflicts.
Tests have their own buzz appeal because they attract media attention when the tests are there to screen out potentially violent job applicants. ‘Anger’ tests bring drama to the workplace. Human resource personnel, coaches, psychologists, and instructional designers call corporate personality tests ‘assessments.’ Honesty or integrity assessments in employment environments may even be mistakenly referred to as “personality surveys.” They are not the same as personality preference classifiers. The actual preference classifiers also can be labeled questionnaires, indicators, classifiers, sorters, or profilers. All of them have one direction in common—to provide self-insight, explore values, and reveal habits of how people take in information, process data, and make decisions.
Workplace violence is on the upswing, with one out of five deaths in the workplace caused by assaults or self-inflicted injuries in California alone due to violence, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistic’s 2005 census. Can corporate personality questionnaires help prevent some types of workplace violence? Corporations administer personality assessments indirectly to help prevent injuries on the job due to anger management problems.