Comment by mihaaly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mihaaly | Hacker News Reader

The story reminds me of the HR practices of 'measuring' personality based on questionnaire to judge the competence of people for certain positions and determine their carrier path inside the organization (e.g. at Trimble). Imagine you are a software engineer applying for an engineering role and they ask you a hundred or more questions to compare the importance of aspects such as punctuality, trust, being patient, lawfulness, honesty and several more, 3 at a time, make a strict order of importance. Without specifics on the work context and situation. Then they build a multi dozen component report how good you are in this and that on a 1 to 5 scale. The way you work. Based on answers to strange questions, not actual work. When it is impossible to answer accurately (because it depends, or there is no order like between playing piano or being tall) then the results will be inaccurate, yet they use it to classify workforce like steel by its properties, determining their fate. Assessing work performance before doing any work. And they take it dead seriously like gauge on a pressure tank. It is just so ... well dumb, forcing any kind of oversimplified measurement on complex and fluid things, sounds like measuring friendliness by meter. People change, people adapt, people behave differently in different circumstances, very very differently, and definitely not how they admit it, no one can count how many influential factors there are, these robotic and unified approaches are just distorting for the purpose of appearing fair. It is far from fair, it is just robotic - which is ironic from a department called human resources, feels like robots work there not humans. Measuring fish by how high it can jump before allowing to swim.

It is just pretentious not scientific.

I thought about 6 months whether I should call companies out if I'm really unhappy with their recruiting process. I decided the potential increase in transparancy is worth the risk.

I once applied to ING (the biggest Dutch national bank). They gave me a test like this and rejected me because I'm not responsible enough.

The irony is that I was complimented on my responsibility when I was an instructor on a coding school. This was especially in light of all the other teachers resigning because they couldn't cope with their classes.

I told ING this. I told them I'd work for free for 3 months, so they can try me out. Nope, I'm too irresponsible, no matter that I completed my 4 academic study programs in time with high marks and did extracurricular stuff.

It is bullshit indeed. IMO, the real answer is: it seems that Mettamage is responsible based on his past accomplishments. Based on the questionnaire he doesn't rank his responsibility a lot lower compared to the average person. Time will tell whether he is responsible.

If you ever need to take such a test, get yourself in the mindset of "I am a loyal, hard working person", and good results will flow from that one. Just think what kind of employee a company wants to have.

It's easier to fill it out on a test than actually be hard working for a couple of years, so the test is the easy part ;).

My point is more like that it is the best not to be involved with organizations employing such evaluation practices towards their people.

Despite the technical interviews went very well I've quit the recruitment process when faced this mandatory step. I choose not to take those tests. Previous experiences show that where such mechanistic approach is in place those places are not worth working for. I tried to discuss around this kind of test, asking for reasons and proposing substitutes with more position relevant ones, but no, rigid refusal was the answer in polite wrapping. Actually they required two kinds of tests, one personality and one generic ability that included one third - ca. 6 questions - of calculating percentages and sum values quickly, in a financial context. Basically adding and multiplying numbers very quickly. Irrelevant but the results are taken into account seriously.

Yes, great point. A space engineer can feel super inadequate when it comes to systems thinking (since she/he is surrounded by geniuses) but a smart barista can feel like a 5 on the 1 to 5 scale. (Of course the barista might be better than the space engineer, but you get my point).

I've been called in to an extra meeting with my future employers because my answers on one of those. I mean, I'm pretty analytical (I'm doing my PhD in engineering this fall) however I didn't give myself top score on that (and a lot other metrics) as I know people who are a lot more analytical etc than me. After working in that company for a few years (and quit) I realize I should have maxed out on many of those metrics, but all in all its so much bias involved in those questionnaires - and I don't think the people working them are realizing that. At least most of them don't.

And that is without going into the skewing of these questions. Yes I can be motivated to do a good job without answering like this job is the most important task in my life behind breathing and in front of eating.

>After working in that company for a few years (and quit) I realize I should have maxed out on many of those metrics

And then this gets used to assign you a low self-confidence score, which leads to your trustworthiness score decreasing!

Isn't this the route most US universities are increasingly taking, i.e judging applications on personality traits (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...)

Offcourse, they could grow a spine and introduce quotas to achieve the same effect, but I guess that is bad for PR.

Quotas are illegal.

The problem is that they’re using biased metrics to pretend they’re not violating civil rights laws.

I don't know about this Trimble outfit, but many of my friends and relationship partners have found value in similar tests like enneagrams. In my experience, they do help distill relationship dynamics into a smaller set of more understandable patterns. No, it's not rigorous hard science, but neither is most of what we might speak about with a therapist. They can be great frameworks to build on, if you trust the people you're building with.

Then again, the power dynamics when a company tried to work with you on them, I can easily imagine that as threatening. After all, my friends care about both my personal growth and our interpersonal growth -- a company mainly cares about how I can most benefit them.

Anyhow, I suppose I'm defending the class of methods (as I've experienced them), outside the context :)

There is a big difference between using the Enneagram to get to understand yourself and others better and using it to judge people. No profile is 100% correct, but some companies act like they always are.

It's similar to unit test code coverage: a great tool to point to areas that might use some attention, but a bad tool to determine whether a commit should be rejected.

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