Personality Types and Hiring

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.

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.

Personality types are horoscopes for business people.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm getting flashbacks to when I was 16 and applying for Radio Shack.

Ah, somebody (again) misspelled “Pseudoscience and hiring”. Stop categorizing people and test for what you want to test for.