How about the Taleo personality test? What do you think of those?
I always groan when I see a personality test in the hiring process because it means I won’t get an interview. Never once have I gotten an interview after taking a personality test.
The worst was flunking a computerized personality test at Value Village and not being allowed to continue with the hiring process. That was some years ago and they’ve stopped doing it.
According to Gavin deBecker, the original reason for these damn personality tests was to screen out people who who might go postal. And I realize that stealing is a big problem and they have to screen out people who steal, well, steal a lot, anyway. Pardon my bitterness—Ive really been put through the wringer by some of these people.
Back in 2001, a company I was with was going through major turmoil. They were international, their US division was run from Paris and their second line managers in the US were all French.
Nothing was getting done. They brought in a company to do team building with the managers and had us all take the Meyers Brigg test. After the test, we were taken to the Raritan River where we were taught how to row crew. Later that night we spent time at Princeton University where we were broken into teams and did a scavenger hunt.
During the seminar, we were presented with the 16 types of personalities and what each meant as well as how each personality conflicted or complimented each other.
Finally we were taken into a parking lot which was gridded out. As they called the personality type, you went to that box and stood there. After every box was called we were told to look around and see where our conflicts were or where we worked well together.
I learned why the people I couldn’t stand were like that. When we returned to the office after the weekend, and started to get back to our daily tasks, people started working better together.
The other testI took was Strengthfinders. Only reason I took it was to put it on my resume when I applied for a position at Rackspace. They are big on that and everyone has their Strengthfinders profiles in their work area.