- helpless
  - depressed
  - jerks

The top one has about %50 shot of being a character flaw, eg, no amount of confidence-building will help.

The middle one has the most hope, if the talent potential is significant. The best in the field can be painfully shy as well as depressed. The problem is that depression (not shyness) hurts morale. [1]

The last has a %75 chance of being a lost cause. Impossible to manage as they are incredibly disruptive to morale and productivity. [2] Their survival is often linked to mastery of politics, which inculcates their position.

[1] http://m.fastcoexist.com/1679208/a-sad-worker-is-a-bad-worke...

[2] The No *sshole Rule by Robert Sutton

When you have worked with someone that screams at their coworkers, can barely feed/clothe themselves or refuses to lift a finger to help you... then you will know how much time and emotional effort these behavioral traits can waste.

I cringe whenever I read job ads that are aiming for a culture fit: "we only want to hire harmonious, independent, extroverted employees;" when in my experience, the best employees do not hold strongly to those ideals, but neither to do they hangout at the other extremes.

There is the another option. Make something people want and build it up slowly, on the side. If you do, you may free yourself from being at the beckon call of other masters (other than users). Others have, so it's possible. We are each masters of our own fate.

Peace.

Only someone without life experience would not read between the lines that buckets are ideals and need the explanation that hiring is holistic.

To then make a straw man fallacy out of the opposite of an ideal is to be inconsistent: you can't have it both ways.

    - people that put their percentage symbols in the wrong place

    - People who capitalise their sentences.

    - People who spell 'capitalize' as 'capitalise'

That's the value of these tests (when properly applied): They allow an evaluator to make statistically accurate predictions of specific types of behavior. The key is the two words: statistically and specific. A single composite score will not tell you anything, but the idea that there's a 68% chance that the person you're about to hire is a schizophrenic kleptomaniac should give you pause.

Sorry, I don't believe "psychometric tests" can do that either. At least not at the level that we're talking about: distinguishing an otherwise qualified person from someone who's got some sort of psychopathology.

I don't believe in employment discrimination on the basis of mental illness. After all, John Nash was schizophrenic.

So what your letting in is a subgroup of people who pass, and psychopaths.

In these tests, they know what to say, what to do, to give a certain impression. These tests can't catch them, because they are not honest, and lack integrity(No consistent values, only ones that benefit them).

There are certainly psychopaths who are hopeless at concealing the fact. These are typically the less smart ones, so you wouldn't meet them; they are more likely to be in and out of prison than your office.

There are also psychopaths who are just about perfect at pretending not to be, and have no intention of ever doing otherwise. You can work with one of those for decades, and never notice a thing unless something extreme enough to make 'acting normal' seem a long-term liability happens.

I don't remember where I got the number, but apparently something like two-thirds of the regular army still end up unwilling/unable to aim properly when a combat situation actually happens. That's from the Great War, though; procedures may have gotten better since.

You'd think that, but a quality psychometric test can't be gamed if it was developed in-house and is only taken once by the candidate. This particular company might not have had one of those, however.

Professional personality tests can't be gamed - you also can't find these on the internet, because they're very strictly copyrighted.

Instead of trying to get rid of questions that are gameable, the psychometrists design the test with statistical consistency - things as obscure as, say, what color the candidate answers in a multiple choice question out of orange, yellow, blue and red can be used to correlate with other questions (not literally, but to a candidate it would be equally obscure and seemingly innocuous as a question). If a candidate answers one question in what they perceive to be the societal ideal, this will be exposed in other questions where it's not possible to cross-consistently game the question unless you've read and thoroughly understand a manual of psychology or psychometry.

Tests designed this way allow for a certain amount of "gaming" by candidates before it crosses a statistical threshold, at which point it essentially tells the proctor, "The answers are so inconsistent that the candidate wasn't being honest." and you have to throw out the whole test (which in the context of hiring, means rejecting the candidate).

The reason why this works is because while people will answer "Would you consider yourself hard working?" with "Always" or some other unrealistically gamed superlative, they won't realize that other questions that are seemingly unrelated are highly correlated with that quality - if you answer yes to one and no to another, you probably lied on the transparent one, with high confidence.

Tests like this[1] have been around for so long that they consistently get better, though there are some valid criticisms of them being easier for non-minorities (for a variety of reasons). They are used in clinical and professional contexts, and while the quality personality tests will theoretically be consistent across multiple-test takings (in other words, results are relatively immutable), in practice you should probably avoid giving one individual a lot of exposure to the same exact test twice.

Hope that helps.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Multiphasic_Personali...

The MMPI is harder than the Myers Briggs, but not that difficult. Additionally its really only optimal for clinical samples, at which it is very good.

However, everyone in the field knows that these tests can be gamed, the only open question is how many people game them consistently.

You can probably estimate the proportion of social desirability exhibited in job interviews by comparing to non-job situations (such as a sample matched on all relevant covariates (whatever they are) from the general population.

Nonetheless, believing in personality tests as an accurate indicator of personality is as misguided as believing that Facebook represents the social graph of all its daily active users accurately, i.e., somewhat misguided.

And I am aware of lie scale, and they are trivial if you actually read the question. Protip: If a question says always or never, its probably designed to trip you up.

I do agree that personality tests are more accurate than this thread makes them out to be, but they are certainly not as useful as your comment implies.

Is there anything you've got offhand that I can read further about this? I didn't know you could actually game them.

Despite this, I have ran many surveys back when I worked in academia. You can detect some of this stuff with Guttman errors, but these are not often used, and as long as you are consistent, its very difficult to spot.

Can you provide a deeper example? I'm honestly curious - what sort of question is innocuous enough to be answered honestly, yet useful enough to provide information? (i.e., do slackers like the color yellow or something?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline

http://www.physicschick.com/pole/2012xxxx/psych.txt

By googling those, you can go deeper into the rabbit hole.

A acquaintance of mine is finishing his dissertation on faking on personality and integrity tests, so I'll know more on that soon.

However I question your absolute statement. What man can create, man can circumvent. (How's that for an absolute statement?)

Would you say that the people who created the test cannot game it?

You should also read upthread, what the actual psychologist said. It clarified my comment really well.

Oh come on. This was posted in a different comment:

http://www.physicschick.com/pole/2012xxxx/psych.txt

The following are very obviously the "correct" true or false answers to these questions from the MMPI-2:

  T * My mother is a good woman.
  F * Evil spirits possess me at times.
  F * There seems to be a lump in my throat much of the time.
  T * At times I feel like swearing.
  T * My hands and feet are usually warm enough.
  F * Ghosts or spirits can influence people for good or bad.
  F * Someone has been trying to poison me.
  F * Everything tastes the same.
  F * Someone has been trying to rob me.
  F * Bad words, often terrible words, come into my mind
      and I cannot get rid of them.
  F * Often I feel as if there is a tight band around my head.
  F * Peculiar odors come to me at times.
  F * My soul sometimes leaves my body.
  F * When a man is with a woman he is usually thinking
      about things related to her sex.
  F * I often feel as if things are not real.
  F * Someone has it in for me.
  F * My neck spots with red often.
  T * Once in awhile I laugh at a dirty joke.
  F * I hear strange things when I am alone.
  F * In walking I am very careful to step over sidewalk cracks.
  F * At one or more times in my life, I felt that someone
      was making me do things by hypnotizing me.

Again, I'll reiterate: can they be gamed? Yes. Is it likely? Emphatically, no.

Are you referring to the MMPI or something similar? Or to Unicru and Kenexa? Unicru seems to ask much more prosaic questions than MMPI.

And yes, when I speak of gaming, I am assuming prior knowledge and preparation - but not necessarily inside knowledge.