The test succeeds in its purpose: weeding out those who cannot figure out how to deal with the immense amount of bullshit inherent to any retail position. If someone isn't savvy enough to tell their employer stealing is wrong, they probably aren't savvy enough to tell the customers the dress makes them look skinny.
This is an unfortunate stereotype, to think that retail implies a certain amount of bullshit. I am more inclined to say it's a result of dilution of good practice and good faith when intents and goals are misaligned. You'd probably agree, but the blame isn't all on retail per se.
The real problem is that we don't have effective screens for employees. What is an hour-long interview going to tell you? Little. And you're going to have to do many of them. If you interview as few as 10 people at an hour a piece, that's $250 at $10/hr salary rates. Most likely, the person doing your hiring is getting more than that and so it could easily be in the $500-1000 range. And that doesn't even count the time used reviewing resumes. If you're in a labor intensive industry, you'd like to lessen the screening process if at all possible.
I think these tests are stupid. Unions hand out answer sheets to anyone that asks them, answers are available online, and it's not that hard to guess that a company wouldn't want to hire someone who thought that failures were always someone else's fault or that they usually quit doing things in the middle. We need a lot of good research in this area. It's very difficult to tell good workers from bad workers and that causes both businesses and good workers harm as the business can't tell who to hire and compensate at good levels. Anyone have any ideas?
"We see absolutely no evidence of any significant cheating taking place in the use of our assessments or that the cheating is substantially affecting the validity of the assessments," says David Scarborough, who helped develop the test and works for its owner, Kronos Inc.
Of course, that's what he would say, but what if he's telling the truth? If anyone stands to gain from research into what tests correlate well with job success, it's these guys.
It's entirely possible that the test still measures qualities correlated with job success, even when the applicants cheat to pass it. It's also possible that having any prescreening test -- even a totally irrelevant one -- improves the quality of employees.
"The real problem is that we don't have effective screens for employees. What is an hour-long interview going to tell you? Little. And you're going to have to do many of them."
A friend of mine who is a dentist told me that he was looking to hire a new assistant, and that the usual procedure is to have them do a working interview. That is, they work a day in their intended position.
I would find it hard to suggest a programmer do such an interview, but when you compare it to doing a dozen interviews over two or three days, for an hour or so each, in more contrived circumstances...
"The Kraplan project grew out of parodies of some awful Kaplan advertisements in the Boston subway. Kraplan is a project to use humor and invective to get people thinking about standardized testing. "
Reminds me of my favorite example of a prescreening personality test.
Southwest used to put a bunch of candidates in a room together and ask each one to make a short presentation. But they weren't observing the presenter. They were observing the audience. They figured that if you paid attention to your competitors, you'd probably pay pretty good attention to your customers.
Must have worked pretty well. But the cat is out of the bag by now.
most of us have trouble with "all" and "never" qualifications. it's one thing to be reasonable, not make excuses, and do one's best, but when one starts thinking deeply about various scenarios, then the "right" answer seems like an overly simplistic lie.
The answers to some of the statements are not totally obvious. If we assume the "answer key" mentioned in the article is correct (http://melbel.com), we are supposed agree with "You have no big regrets about your past" but also agree with "You look back and feel bad about things you’ve done". Likewise, we are supposed to disagree with "You are good at leading people" but agree with "You are good at taking charge of a group" and "You like to take the lead with others".
I can't, because in order to do so I have to guess how unreasonable the person assessing the test is.
Take the question "You have to give up on some things that you start." The answer you're supposed to give is "strongly disagree." But I strongly agree with that statement. Something I've noticed in research is that the most productive people know when to drop something and move on to something else. The opposite of this statement is a platitude - you should never give up. I think you'd have to be a moron to agree with it.
On the other hand, I know that saying, essentially, "sometimes you have to give up" sounds bad to some people.
So now it becomes a guessing game. Do I assume the person assessing the test is a reasonable person with a nuanced appreciation for the realities in life, or is the person a moron?
I must admit, I have failed every one of these automated tests that I've ever taken. On the other hand, I've been offered every position I've ever interviewed in person for.
Maybe I just don't have a temperament suited for this sort of retail work?
John Soong, 18, says that after he had failed to get jobs at several chains that use the test, he began to poke around for an answer key, driven by "altruistic, and maybe vengeful," motives.
