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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

I've both taken and been at a company that administered personality tests as part of the interview process. I found the results fairly useless to be honest. Although I did manage to score so low on one part of the assessment that an interviewer seemed to question my basic ability to function in society.

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Personality tests are broken - there is no way a functioning human being will answer them truthfully. Not for the lack of trying... our subconscious will try to protect us and we'll answer in a way we imagine it is socially acceptable.

While I have little doubt they're indeed broken in the way you describe, as long as the results are consistent they could still be useful to hire for diversity.

You would care more about your team members having a wide variety of results, rather than the qualitative interpretation of the results themselves.

Personality tests are useful for one thing: Filtering out potential employers that I don't want to work for.

@johnsmith4739 You've arrived at home after a long day at the office. As you take your wallet & keys, you realize that you've accidentally taken home a granola bar that you obtained from the snack room at work. You had intended to eat it at your desk, but for some reason you forgot. On a scale of 1 to 10, how guilty do you feel for having unlawfully stolen property from your employer?

I love it! What if I am the owner? Is then "guilty capitalism?"

Then you'd risk being accused of fraud when you file an insurance claim for the missing granola bar.

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