Personality Types and Hiring(vaishnavsunil.substack.com)
vaishnavsunil.substack.com
Personality Types and Hiring
https://vaishnavsunil.substack.com/p/you-seem-too-high-in-openness
36 comments
Ah, somebody (again) misspelled “Pseudoscience and hiring”. Stop categorizing people and test for what you want to test for.
Personality types are horoscopes for business people.
Unrelated, but funnily enough some doctors use the four temperaments in order to aid their diagnosing of patients today.
It's true that personality tests per se might have little value in the business world. But the fact that traits cluster together in non random ways is not irrelevant to making predictions about people. Big five literature is one of the few things in psychology that have mostly stood the test of time.
There are lots of things in psychology that have stood the rest of time that are much more useful. Developmental milestones, adoption and extinction of trained habits, clinical assessments of sensory modalities at various stages of conduction.
How so?
A few reasons in addition to what others have added.
1) I have yet to see an instance where they have been proven to be repeatable (as in the same person scores as the same type consistently).
2) All of it assumes that the person taking the test is telling you what they really are, and not what they think you want to hear. Some tests do try to ask the same question in multiple ways to trip someone up, but anyone who is paying attention can get past that. So now you're not testing their personality, you're testing their projection of a personality.
1) I have yet to see an instance where they have been proven to be repeatable (as in the same person scores as the same type consistently).
2) All of it assumes that the person taking the test is telling you what they really are, and not what they think you want to hear. Some tests do try to ask the same question in multiple ways to trip someone up, but anyone who is paying attention can get past that. So now you're not testing their personality, you're testing their projection of a personality.
They're also self-fulfilling prophecy. The diagnosis becomes the disease.
A person who's told their entire life that they're a Leo will start to recognize Leo-like behaviors and reinforce those.
A person who's told their entire life that they're introverted/extroverted et al. will do the same.
A person who's told their entire life that they're a Leo will start to recognize Leo-like behaviors and reinforce those.
A person who's told their entire life that they're introverted/extroverted et al. will do the same.
Not the poster, but,
the underlying assertion is that attempts to formalize a nomenclature for personality are based on false premises; and more importantly, are not meaningful predictors of behavior (e.g. success in a given role/industry/whatever).
There is a footnote here where the question is not "are these measuring objective qualities" but "are the answers people give, to the same test, correlated strongly with things we are interested in." Such as succeeding at the "corporate rat race."
Related rabbit hole:
The meaningful argument in favor of IQ tests is this: not that what they are measuring is strongly correlated with "intelligence" however defined; but rather, that performance on these tests is correlated with things employers are interested in.
Supeficially that would include "being good at taking standardized tests" but success is I imagine more correlated with "knowing how to play the game of taking these tests, and, how to 'game' them to get the best results regardless of knowledge,"
not to mention problematic things such as "having internalized and being fluent in the dominant cultural language and its knowledge base."
the underlying assertion is that attempts to formalize a nomenclature for personality are based on false premises; and more importantly, are not meaningful predictors of behavior (e.g. success in a given role/industry/whatever).
There is a footnote here where the question is not "are these measuring objective qualities" but "are the answers people give, to the same test, correlated strongly with things we are interested in." Such as succeeding at the "corporate rat race."
Related rabbit hole:
The meaningful argument in favor of IQ tests is this: not that what they are measuring is strongly correlated with "intelligence" however defined; but rather, that performance on these tests is correlated with things employers are interested in.
Supeficially that would include "being good at taking standardized tests" but success is I imagine more correlated with "knowing how to play the game of taking these tests, and, how to 'game' them to get the best results regardless of knowledge,"
not to mention problematic things such as "having internalized and being fluent in the dominant cultural language and its knowledge base."
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.124...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014829...
It has been long regarded as pseudoscience
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014829...
It has been long regarded as pseudoscience
For starters, they require people to be self aware which automatically fails half the population.
Some of the claims here feel like leaps of intuition. You claim companies don't but many companies, especially ones that are not in the tech industry, do employ personality quizzes in their screening process. Even tech companies, now that I think about it, employ a personality test in the form of a "cultural" interview. I am dubious on how helpful they are but they highlight the real issue which is that there simply isn't enough signal during the interview process.
Every hiring process boils down to a risk mitigation problem and the goal is to get enough positive (or negative) signal to make a hiring decision. If that's the case, making the interview an "adversarial" process seems like an awful idea. As you pointed out, why would a candidate share information that puts them in a bad light? It creates an environment where it is hard to extract meaningful signal.
Furthermore, if there's no free lunch from analyzing personality, then why is it worth thinking about in this way? Perhaps it is more critical and effective to verify their skills and experience with the limited interview time and rely on references to validate their work habits.
Every hiring process boils down to a risk mitigation problem and the goal is to get enough positive (or negative) signal to make a hiring decision. If that's the case, making the interview an "adversarial" process seems like an awful idea. As you pointed out, why would a candidate share information that puts them in a bad light? It creates an environment where it is hard to extract meaningful signal.
Furthermore, if there's no free lunch from analyzing personality, then why is it worth thinking about in this way? Perhaps it is more critical and effective to verify their skills and experience with the limited interview time and rely on references to validate their work habits.
I think that "cultural" interviews are underrated as a distinguisher; just because they seem so subjective. However, if the correct, non-domain specific, person conducts the interview, it can be a great source of information. At the most basic level, it assesses whether the candidate is a complete nut, or not; it assesses whether that individual, outside of any skills considerations, can work with others in the organization, either as a follower, peer, or leader. A competent person doing these types of interviews is essentially conducting an unstructured, informal, personality assessment and producing some very valuable insights to others later in the process. We ought not discount intuition, or "feel". A genuinely insightful person conducting a good screening interview may be the most valuable person in your hiring organization.
Great caveat, not trying to throw away the baby with the bathwater when it comes to cultural interviews or even personality based assessments. It can be done well. My personal take (which I admit is equally a leap of intuition) is that there are probably more cost-effective ways to gain more signal. Anecdotally for instance, I'm seeing an increase in pair-coding/work-along type interviews where both sides get an intuitive sense of the other's depth of technical expertise as well as a taste of what it's like to work with each other.
Seems like you either misinterpreted or I didn't communicate as well as I should have. I'm not arguing for making interviews "adversarial" in spirit (or even in substance). I'm saying that interviews are implicitly adversarial games, inw hich the recruiter is trying to (ideally) maximize the chance of obtaining relevant signals and the interviewee isn't always aligned with that goal. Often, interviewees want jobs even if they're not a "great fit". Which is why I'm arguing for in fact a less adversarial conversation, in which you infer negatives from other positive information interviewees will excitedly share.
It's never going to not be a negotiation. All you're doing is limiting your options by arguing from personality typology. What you should be doing is asking behavioral questions and digging in on the responses you get. You'll get better information about what a candidate will do and how they reason through interpersonal problems than asking them questions like "which would you prefer on your time off -- going to a party with a lot of people, or spending time inside reading a book?" Questions like that which appear on many personality inventories are so abstract as to be almost meaningless.
Also you need to understand that if you start personality testing people you will never get any truthful information from your candidates. They do this kind of testing for many retail sales roles and every sales associate you'll ever meet knows exactly how to answer every question to maximize extraversion and minimize undesirable traits. It quickly stops being a test of whether you have what it takes, unless your intent is to test whether people are deeply aware of how fake personality testing is and exactly how to game the system to get past it.
Also you need to understand that if you start personality testing people you will never get any truthful information from your candidates. They do this kind of testing for many retail sales roles and every sales associate you'll ever meet knows exactly how to answer every question to maximize extraversion and minimize undesirable traits. It quickly stops being a test of whether you have what it takes, unless your intent is to test whether people are deeply aware of how fake personality testing is and exactly how to game the system to get past it.
Inferring negatives from positive information sharing seems pretty adversarial to me, both in spirit and in substance.
My comment was to question why the interview should be framed as something implicity adversarial to begin with. And why it's probably better to use something like references to validate what it would be like to work with someone rather than rely on our own dubious judgement or the positively biased judgement of the candidate's.
My comment was to question why the interview should be framed as something implicity adversarial to begin with. And why it's probably better to use something like references to validate what it would be like to work with someone rather than rely on our own dubious judgement or the positively biased judgement of the candidate's.
I've seen DISC and Kolbe used at companies I have been at. I've learned that I have a low tolerance for structure and work best on large projects with lots of unknowns and autonomy. Explains why I've always preferred startups over larger companies. Seems like few companies can accommodate ADHD people. It's a shame because once I'm focused and interested in a project I do incredible work. But the daily standup, pick something off the queue, weekly sprints don't seem to be the environment I thrive under. Ask me to build a big system or service and I can come back in a month and deliver something incredible.
Can relate to the ADHD bit and ditto on environments that are best for personal productivity. I started at a big bank, moved to a VC fund, then an early stage startup and now work as an independent consultant for a non profit now. With each move, as autonomy increased and incentives were more aligned, I found myself producing a lot more. A large part of it is that I was able to also find work that was interesting but I think the bigger factor was autonomy, alignment of incentives and whether I was judged on metrics that correspond to my strengths. It's not even like i have an inifnitely high risk appetite but for personality reasons, I've resigned myself to the fact that if i want to succeed, I have to pursue almost complete autonomy and thus expose myself to broader variance.
My hot take is that at some level, ADHD is indistinguishable from low conscientiousness - forgetting appointments, meetings, calls etc. More precisely, ADHD seems negatively correlated with the orderliness facet of conscientiousness but orthogonal to industriousness. If you're high on industriousness and low on orderliness, you sort of have no choice but to be your own boss.
My hot take is that at some level, ADHD is indistinguishable from low conscientiousness - forgetting appointments, meetings, calls etc. More precisely, ADHD seems negatively correlated with the orderliness facet of conscientiousness but orthogonal to industriousness. If you're high on industriousness and low on orderliness, you sort of have no choice but to be your own boss.
Yes, ADHD definitely seems to correlate with high openness and low conscientiousness. I've also found most self-help and productivity advice to be useless.
I'm getting flashbacks to when I was 16 and applying for Radio Shack.
This makes absolutely no sense.
Taking ideal job traits negative and positive, converting it into correlative personality traits, and guessing the personality trait of the candidate is adding unnecessary abstraction layers with no benefit.
Or to put it another way, just interview the candidate for evidence of the positive and negative traits, don’t do the extra step of translating it into the language of personality theory because the translation is more vague, interpretable, and subjectively biased than the original data.
If you want to use personality traits, it should function as a time saver to quickly approximate candidates potential strengths and weaknesses, which you can hone into with more questioning. It is like alpha beta pruning, used to quickly identify the avenues of further questioning so your time is well spent.
Taking ideal job traits negative and positive, converting it into correlative personality traits, and guessing the personality trait of the candidate is adding unnecessary abstraction layers with no benefit.
Or to put it another way, just interview the candidate for evidence of the positive and negative traits, don’t do the extra step of translating it into the language of personality theory because the translation is more vague, interpretable, and subjectively biased than the original data.
If you want to use personality traits, it should function as a time saver to quickly approximate candidates potential strengths and weaknesses, which you can hone into with more questioning. It is like alpha beta pruning, used to quickly identify the avenues of further questioning so your time is well spent.
> Taking ideal job traits negative and positive, converting it into correlative personality traits, and guessing the personality trait of the candidate is adding unnecessary abstraction layers with no benefit.
Because that is the wrong approach. Instead, an employer should conduct a personality assessment and keep it as data for later comparison against performance to build a baseline of total average employee personality correlation. It would let the employer know what performance traits to select for in order to maximize for performance in a given role. Unlike an interview a standardized assessment is unbiased when comparing the data between different candidates/employees.
Seriously, if you want to know about a candidate you only need two things:
1. Personality/intelligence assessment
2. Make them write an essay, by hand without a computer.
If they cannot write original words they cannot write original software. They can probably still script together some reused framework bullshit, though, so it depends upon the needs of a given employer.
I wrote about this just earlier today in an unrelated thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241838
Because that is the wrong approach. Instead, an employer should conduct a personality assessment and keep it as data for later comparison against performance to build a baseline of total average employee personality correlation. It would let the employer know what performance traits to select for in order to maximize for performance in a given role. Unlike an interview a standardized assessment is unbiased when comparing the data between different candidates/employees.
Seriously, if you want to know about a candidate you only need two things:
1. Personality/intelligence assessment
2. Make them write an essay, by hand without a computer.
If they cannot write original words they cannot write original software. They can probably still script together some reused framework bullshit, though, so it depends upon the needs of a given employer.
I wrote about this just earlier today in an unrelated thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241838
Is there data on how stable personality assessments are? I've heard they tend to change depending on one's mood or circumstances. I can also imagine some people are really good at displaying the traits they think someone wants only to have that façade fall off once on the job. It seems like intelligence tests would be much harder to fudge, assuming we agree on what constitutes intelligence.
Personality changes over time due to life experience, practice, trauma, and so forth. It’s not permanently crystallized the way intelligence is.
It’s doesn’t change from day to day though. It is durable over time, semi-crystallized.
That said, the same things cause variance in intelligence assessments would cause variations in personality assessments. That does not indicate a defect in the testing, but rather poor preparation on the part of the tester. Just as the goal is to score as high as possible on an intelligence assessment the goal is to score as honest as possible on a personality assessment, which requires participating under the best conditions.
At any rate the best way to determine test honesty for both intelligence and personality assessments is to retest a candidate 3 weeks later.
I can remember the 4.5 hours of intelligence and personality assessments I took for consideration in full time employment with JSOC. It was the greatest single intensity of mental exhaustion I can remember in a long time.
It’s doesn’t change from day to day though. It is durable over time, semi-crystallized.
That said, the same things cause variance in intelligence assessments would cause variations in personality assessments. That does not indicate a defect in the testing, but rather poor preparation on the part of the tester. Just as the goal is to score as high as possible on an intelligence assessment the goal is to score as honest as possible on a personality assessment, which requires participating under the best conditions.
At any rate the best way to determine test honesty for both intelligence and personality assessments is to retest a candidate 3 weeks later.
I can remember the 4.5 hours of intelligence and personality assessments I took for consideration in full time employment with JSOC. It was the greatest single intensity of mental exhaustion I can remember in a long time.
I can’t tell if you are being serious or not
I wish I were. Every single programming job interview during my 15 years of programming experience either wastes time assessing basic literacy or takes less than 30 minutes to achieve selection.
That basic literacy comes in different forms, like can you read code in your desired language, or other various forms. Even still I have frequently worked with people that struggle to read/write whether in code or especially in natural language.
Let’s cut the bullshit and not dance around it. Just assess it directly. If a person cannot write in natural language they will not have the cognitive competence to write original software. The very best you could hope for is some framework junky that can extend/modify boilerplate.
That basic literacy comes in different forms, like can you read code in your desired language, or other various forms. Even still I have frequently worked with people that struggle to read/write whether in code or especially in natural language.
Let’s cut the bullshit and not dance around it. Just assess it directly. If a person cannot write in natural language they will not have the cognitive competence to write original software. The very best you could hope for is some framework junky that can extend/modify boilerplate.
Most of the (tech) companies out there don’t need the “best” engineers to succeed. Tired of seeing how we reject candidates simply because they haven’t worked for known companies or because they cannot reverse a bin tree in 20 min. Mind you, all we are doing is burning investors money, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.
After reading the post, I'll just take the subtitle and run with it:
> Using personality clues strategically to stress test potential hires
The post pays lip-service to the concept of 'pop science' but then goes face-first into surface-level pop psychology.
> The personality science literature also let’s us stereotype a bit better.
There it is. Introverts are like X, extraverts are like Y, and maybe also Narcissists...
The sequel to this post will be how to label those people better: the lone wolf, the loose cannon, the people pleaser, etc. etc.
> Using personality clues strategically to stress test potential hires
The post pays lip-service to the concept of 'pop science' but then goes face-first into surface-level pop psychology.
> The personality science literature also let’s us stereotype a bit better.
There it is. Introverts are like X, extraverts are like Y, and maybe also Narcissists...
The sequel to this post will be how to label those people better: the lone wolf, the loose cannon, the people pleaser, etc. etc.
Latest research is showing that personality isn't permanent and that it's a factor of a lot of things - experience, environment, mental mindset, motivation, etc. Relying on it for stuff like this is problematic in a lot of ways.
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I would definitely take Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and so forth into account in hiring, if I had any faith in my ability to determine those things from the interview process without being fooled. But the only thing I am confident I can find out from a stranger under time constraints without being fooled is "Were you good at this job in your previous role" so I focus on that.
Companies hiring with personality tests are simultaneously telling you their personality.
You have absolutely no moral obligation to be truthful with these devices. "Professionalism" is the extent of corporate expectations and intrusion into your thoughts
You have absolutely no moral obligation to be truthful with these devices. "Professionalism" is the extent of corporate expectations and intrusion into your thoughts
>Certain traits, like conscientiousness and agreeableness, are generally seen as universally positive
It's my understanding that agreeableness isn't universally positive. Think about if you had an airline quality engineer who was too agreeable; they may not push back on a deficient product and defer to those who want to push it through just to get along. I've also heard that the most successful people don't necessarily score high on agreeableness.
It's my understanding that agreeableness isn't universally positive. Think about if you had an airline quality engineer who was too agreeable; they may not push back on a deficient product and defer to those who want to push it through just to get along. I've also heard that the most successful people don't necessarily score high on agreeableness.