Personality Types and Hiring
vaishnavsunil.substack.com
vaishnavsunil.substack.com
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.
Because that is the wrong approach. Instead, an employer should conduct a personality assessment and keep it as data for later comparison against performance to build a baseline of total average employee personality correlation. It would let the employer know what performance traits to select for in order to maximize for performance in a given role. Unlike an interview a standardized assessment is unbiased when comparing the data between different candidates/employees.
Seriously, if you want to know about a candidate you only need two things:
1. Personality/intelligence assessment
2. Make them write an essay, by hand without a computer.
If they cannot write original words they cannot write original software. They can probably still script together some reused framework bullshit, though, so it depends upon the needs of a given employer.
I wrote about this just earlier today in an unrelated thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241838
That basic literacy comes in different forms, like can you read code in your desired language, or other various forms. Even still I have frequently worked with people that struggle to read/write whether in code or especially in natural language.
Let’s cut the bullshit and not dance around it. Just assess it directly. If a person cannot write in natural language they will not have the cognitive competence to write original software. The very best you could hope for is some framework junky that can extend/modify boilerplate.
It’s doesn’t change from day to day though. It is durable over time, semi-crystallized.
That said, the same things cause variance in intelligence assessments would cause variations in personality assessments. That does not indicate a defect in the testing, but rather poor preparation on the part of the tester. Just as the goal is to score as high as possible on an intelligence assessment the goal is to score as honest as possible on a personality assessment, which requires participating under the best conditions.
At any rate the best way to determine test honesty for both intelligence and personality assessments is to retest a candidate 3 weeks later.
I can remember the 4.5 hours of intelligence and personality assessments I took for consideration in full time employment with JSOC. It was the greatest single intensity of mental exhaustion I can remember in a long time.
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.
Also you need to understand that if you start personality testing people you will never get any truthful information from your candidates. They do this kind of testing for many retail sales roles and every sales associate you'll ever meet knows exactly how to answer every question to maximize extraversion and minimize undesirable traits. It quickly stops being a test of whether you have what it takes, unless your intent is to test whether people are deeply aware of how fake personality testing is and exactly how to game the system to get past it.
My comment was to question why the interview should be framed as something implicity adversarial to begin with. And why it's probably better to use something like references to validate what it would be like to work with someone rather than rely on our own dubious judgement or the positively biased judgement of the candidate's.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014829...
It has been long regarded as pseudoscience
the underlying assertion is that attempts to formalize a nomenclature for personality are based on false premises; and more importantly, are not meaningful predictors of behavior (e.g. success in a given role/industry/whatever).
There is a footnote here where the question is not "are these measuring objective qualities" but "are the answers people give, to the same test, correlated strongly with things we are interested in." Such as succeeding at the "corporate rat race."
Related rabbit hole:
The meaningful argument in favor of IQ tests is this: not that what they are measuring is strongly correlated with "intelligence" however defined; but rather, that performance on these tests is correlated with things employers are interested in.
Supeficially that would include "being good at taking standardized tests" but success is I imagine more correlated with "knowing how to play the game of taking these tests, and, how to 'game' them to get the best results regardless of knowledge,"
not to mention problematic things such as "having internalized and being fluent in the dominant cultural language and its knowledge base."
1) I have yet to see an instance where they have been proven to be repeatable (as in the same person scores as the same type consistently).
2) All of it assumes that the person taking the test is telling you what they really are, and not what they think you want to hear. Some tests do try to ask the same question in multiple ways to trip someone up, but anyone who is paying attention can get past that. So now you're not testing their personality, you're testing their projection of a personality.
A person who's told their entire life that they're a Leo will start to recognize Leo-like behaviors and reinforce those.
A person who's told their entire life that they're introverted/extroverted et al. will do the same.
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.
My hot take is that at some level, ADHD is indistinguishable from low conscientiousness - forgetting appointments, meetings, calls etc. More precisely, ADHD seems negatively correlated with the orderliness facet of conscientiousness but orthogonal to industriousness. If you're high on industriousness and low on orderliness, you sort of have no choice but to be your own boss.
You have absolutely no moral obligation to be truthful with these devices. "Professionalism" is the extent of corporate expectations and intrusion into your thoughts
> 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.