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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I once aced an interview before and been told they'd make an offer after this one little Big Five personality test, I think it was called. Fail with no feedback. That's not constructive or actionable. Is that test any better than phrenology or palmistry in practice?

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Probably the big 5 personality matrix/dimensions. It's based on statistics to cluster personality questions and answers that tend to cluster together. The acronym most used to remember those dimensions is OCEAN.

Openness - how easily you are willing to accept new ideas

Conscientiousness - how careful and how hard working you are

Extraversion - how quickly you are to engage with the outside world

Agreeableness - how quickly you are to agree versus disagree

Neuroticism - easily experienced negative emotions

Most people aren't a point on the spectrums, they have a range. For example a lawyer might be very disagreeable at work when talking with opposing counsel, but very agreeable when dealing with their children.

Myers Briggs has been largely discredited because most people don't score consistently when retested over time.

This isn't Meyers Briggs.

In fact stability is the strength of Big5. People's personalities seem to be stable over their lifetime. See the 3rd paragraph [0].

The weakness of Big5 is it may/probably does not capture everything. It seems to completely miss abnormal personality traits. Which in a job interview... I hope has been ruled out with initial screening.

[0] https://archive.org/details/psychology0000scha/page/475

Most people, without practice, are not a range as wide as "very disagreeable" to "very agreeable", most people are flexible around a point, to a lesser extent if they've never paid attention to how they behave and never tried to directly practice behaving differently.

Sure, though I certainly see pretty wide variances in myself based on my environment. If I’m happy and in a good environment then I tend to be very agreeable. As my stress and unhappiness go up, I tend to get pretty disagreeable.

I had one job that was absolutely awful, and to be brutally honest my attitude sucked. I wasn’t as nice to my coworkers as I wish I had been. I wasn’t a complete asshole or anything, and my behavior was never raised with me as being problematic, but I’m not proud of how I acted through that time.

But over the course of a fairly long career I’ve gotten a lot of comments about how laid back and friendly I am, and how I tend to go out of my way help people. I like to think that’s who I really am, but I can definitely be unpleasant if I’m miserable.

This is my question about tests.

First, the trait examined is a range and is also situational. Second, your self knowledge of your ranges and situations is also variable and introduces more error. Third, the test introduces more error, it seems. Nobody on this thread has given any evidence this is a useful hiring tool.

My impression is hiring is difficult and there's no shortage of companies pretending to solve it with science, but it's not solved and it's not science.

This test addresses some of those problems by not only posing the personality questions to just the person you're trying to study the personality of but also friends and co-workers that know them. You can capture that range there. If you're always a jerk at work but nice at home this would capture that You just have to dig into the details.

Agreed. I was just trying to raise the point that people reading my comment should consider their range and the range of others.

I wonder why personality tests are not illegal? This is essentially screening for neurodivergent people and facilitation of discrimination based on disabilities.

My guess would be not enough lawsuits yet.

Until risk to the business increases, a possibly worthless speedbump on the hiring path doesn't hurt hiring and effectively makes more work for the HR manager's team, which means team growth - HR win!

Complicated issue, you also want a diverse, balanced team with different personalities.

Don't forget to Strongly Agree with everything your boss would want to hear and Strongly Disagree with anything that suggests you're a functional human being with goals outside the company's.

"I was let go due to resisting a workaholic intervention by my old team."

I love those tests. Any company that administers them automatically fails.

Here in Norway they seem endemic. That ship has sailed, unfortunately.

> Is that test any better than phrenology or palmistry in practice?

As a rule of thumb, if it involves psychology, the answer is always no. Humans do not have the ability to do valid experiments to verify claims, so it is all BS.

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