5 ms·

Personality Types and Hiring

19 points by vaishnav92 2y ago

TheCleric 2y ago
Personality types are horoscopes for business people.
- dlivingston 2y ago
  How so?
  - contagiousflow 2y ago
    https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12434 https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.124... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0148296385900049?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014829... It has been long regarded as pseudoscience
  - aaroninsf 2y ago
    Not the poster, but, 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."
  - asdasdsddd 2y ago
    For starters, they require people to be self aware which automatically fails half the population.
  - TheCleric 2y ago
    A few reasons in addition to what others have added. 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.
    - drewcoo 2y ago
      They're also self-fulfilling prophecy. The diagnosis becomes the disease. 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.
- Argonaut998 2y ago
  Unrelated, but funnily enough some doctors use the four temperaments in order to aid their diagnosing of patients today.
- vaishnav92 2y ago
  It's true that personality tests per se might have little value in the business world. But the fact that traits cluster together in non random ways is not irrelevant to making predictions about people. Big five literature is one of the few things in psychology that have mostly stood the test of time.
  - NeuroCoder 2y ago
    There are lots of things in psychology that have stood the rest of time that are much more useful. Developmental milestones, adoption and extinction of trained habits, clinical assessments of sensory modalities at various stages of conduction.
Sajarin 2y ago
Some of the claims here feel like leaps of intuition. You claim companies don't but many companies, especially ones that are not in the tech industry, do employ personality quizzes in their screening process. Even tech companies, now that I think about it, employ a personality test in the form of a "cultural" interview. I am dubious on how helpful they are but they highlight the real issue which is that there simply isn't enough signal during the interview process. 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.
- vaishnav92 2y ago
  Seems like you either misinterpreted or I didn't communicate as well as I should have. I'm not arguing for making interviews "adversarial" in spirit (or even in substance). I'm saying that interviews are implicitly adversarial games, inw hich the recruiter is trying to (ideally) maximize the chance of obtaining relevant signals and the interviewee isn't always aligned with that goal. Often, interviewees want jobs even if they're not a "great fit". Which is why I'm arguing for in fact a less adversarial conversation, in which you infer negatives from other positive information interviewees will excitedly share.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    It's never going to not be a negotiation. All you're doing is limiting your options by arguing from personality typology. What you should be doing is asking behavioral questions and digging in on the responses you get. You'll get better information about what a candidate will do and how they reason through interpersonal problems than asking them questions like "which would you prefer on your time off -- going to a party with a lot of people, or spending time inside reading a book?" Questions like that which appear on many personality inventories are so abstract as to be almost meaningless. 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.
bcheung 2y ago
I've seen DISC and Kolbe used at companies I have been at. I've learned that I have a low tolerance for structure and work best on large projects with lots of unknowns and autonomy. Explains why I've always preferred startups over larger companies. Seems like few companies can accommodate ADHD people. It's a shame because once I'm focused and interested in a project I do incredible work. But the daily standup, pick something off the queue, weekly sprints don't seem to be the environment I thrive under. Ask me to build a big system or service and I can come back in a month and deliver something incredible.
- vaishnav92 2y ago
  Can relate to the ADHD bit and ditto on environments that are best for personal productivity. I started at a big bank, moved to a VC fund, then an early stage startup and now work as an independent consultant for a non profit now. With each move, as autonomy increased and incentives were more aligned, I found myself producing a lot more. A large part of it is that I was able to also find work that was interesting but I think the bigger factor was autonomy, alignment of incentives and whether I was judged on metrics that correspond to my strengths. It's not even like i have an inifnitely high risk appetite but for personality reasons, I've resigned myself to the fact that if i want to succeed, I have to pursue almost complete autonomy and thus expose myself to broader variance. 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.
  - bcheung 2y ago
    Yes, ADHD definitely seems to correlate with high openness and low conscientiousness. I've also found most self-help and productivity advice to be useless.
throwway120385 2y ago
I'm getting flashbacks to when I was 16 and applying for Radio Shack.
spyckie2 2y ago
This makes absolutely no sense. 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.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  > 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. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241838
  - klysm 2y ago
    I can’t tell if you are being serious or not
    - 2y ago
dakiol 2y ago
Most of the (tech) companies out there don’t need the “best” engineers to succeed. Tired of seeing how we reject candidates simply because they haven’t worked for known companies or because they cannot reverse a bin tree in 20 min. Mind you, all we are doing is burning investors money, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.
ljm 2y ago
After reading the post, I'll just take the subtitle and run with it: > 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.
qujine 2y ago
Latest research is showing that personality isn't permanent and that it's a factor of a lot of things - experience, environment, mental mindset, motivation, etc. Relying on it for stuff like this is problematic in a lot of ways.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ineptech 2y ago
I would definitely take Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and so forth into account in hiring, if I had any faith in my ability to determine those things from the interview process without being fooled. But the only thing I am confident I can find out from a stranger under time constraints without being fooled is "Were you good at this job in your previous role" so I focus on that.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Companies hiring with personality tests are simultaneously telling you their personality. You have absolutely no moral obligation to be truthful with these devices. "Professionalism" is the extent of corporate expectations and intrusion into your thoughts
asdfgadrghae 2y ago
[flagged]
bumby 2y ago
>Certain traits, like conscientiousness and agreeableness, are generally seen as universally positive 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.
ochronus 2y ago
Ah, somebody (again) misspelled “Pseudoscience and hiring”. Stop categorizing people and test for what you want to test for.

19 points by vaishnav92 2y ago

TheCleric 2y ago

Personality types are horoscopes for business people.

dlivingston 2y ago
How so?
- contagiousflow 2y ago
  https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12434 https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.124... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0148296385900049?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014829... It has been long regarded as pseudoscience
- aaroninsf 2y ago
  Not the poster, but, 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."
- asdasdsddd 2y ago
  For starters, they require people to be self aware which automatically fails half the population.
- TheCleric 2y ago
  A few reasons in addition to what others have added. 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.
  - drewcoo 2y ago
    They're also self-fulfilling prophecy. The diagnosis becomes the disease. 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.
Argonaut998 2y ago
Unrelated, but funnily enough some doctors use the four temperaments in order to aid their diagnosing of patients today.
vaishnav92 2y ago
It's true that personality tests per se might have little value in the business world. But the fact that traits cluster together in non random ways is not irrelevant to making predictions about people. Big five literature is one of the few things in psychology that have mostly stood the test of time.
- NeuroCoder 2y ago
  There are lots of things in psychology that have stood the rest of time that are much more useful. Developmental milestones, adoption and extinction of trained habits, clinical assessments of sensory modalities at various stages of conduction.

Sajarin 2y ago

Some of the claims here feel like leaps of intuition. You claim companies don't but many companies, especially ones that are not in the tech industry, do employ personality quizzes in their screening process. Even tech companies, now that I think about it, employ a personality test in the form of a "cultural" interview. I am dubious on how helpful they are but they highlight the real issue which is that there simply isn't enough signal during the interview process. 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.

vaishnav92 2y ago
Seems like you either misinterpreted or I didn't communicate as well as I should have. I'm not arguing for making interviews "adversarial" in spirit (or even in substance). I'm saying that interviews are implicitly adversarial games, inw hich the recruiter is trying to (ideally) maximize the chance of obtaining relevant signals and the interviewee isn't always aligned with that goal. Often, interviewees want jobs even if they're not a "great fit". Which is why I'm arguing for in fact a less adversarial conversation, in which you infer negatives from other positive information interviewees will excitedly share.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  It's never going to not be a negotiation. All you're doing is limiting your options by arguing from personality typology. What you should be doing is asking behavioral questions and digging in on the responses you get. You'll get better information about what a candidate will do and how they reason through interpersonal problems than asking them questions like "which would you prefer on your time off -- going to a party with a lot of people, or spending time inside reading a book?" Questions like that which appear on many personality inventories are so abstract as to be almost meaningless. 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.

bcheung 2y ago

I've seen DISC and Kolbe used at companies I have been at. I've learned that I have a low tolerance for structure and work best on large projects with lots of unknowns and autonomy. Explains why I've always preferred startups over larger companies. Seems like few companies can accommodate ADHD people. It's a shame because once I'm focused and interested in a project I do incredible work. But the daily standup, pick something off the queue, weekly sprints don't seem to be the environment I thrive under. Ask me to build a big system or service and I can come back in a month and deliver something incredible.

vaishnav92 2y ago
Can relate to the ADHD bit and ditto on environments that are best for personal productivity. I started at a big bank, moved to a VC fund, then an early stage startup and now work as an independent consultant for a non profit now. With each move, as autonomy increased and incentives were more aligned, I found myself producing a lot more. A large part of it is that I was able to also find work that was interesting but I think the bigger factor was autonomy, alignment of incentives and whether I was judged on metrics that correspond to my strengths. It's not even like i have an inifnitely high risk appetite but for personality reasons, I've resigned myself to the fact that if i want to succeed, I have to pursue almost complete autonomy and thus expose myself to broader variance. 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.
- bcheung 2y ago
  Yes, ADHD definitely seems to correlate with high openness and low conscientiousness. I've also found most self-help and productivity advice to be useless.

throwway120385 2y ago

I'm getting flashbacks to when I was 16 and applying for Radio Shack.

spyckie2 2y ago

This makes absolutely no sense. 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.

austin-cheney 2y ago
> 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. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241838
- klysm 2y ago
  I can’t tell if you are being serious or not
  - 2y ago

dakiol 2y ago

Most of the (tech) companies out there don’t need the “best” engineers to succeed. Tired of seeing how we reject candidates simply because they haven’t worked for known companies or because they cannot reverse a bin tree in 20 min. Mind you, all we are doing is burning investors money, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.

ljm 2y ago

After reading the post, I'll just take the subtitle and run with it: > 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.

qujine 2y ago

Latest research is showing that personality isn't permanent and that it's a factor of a lot of things - experience, environment, mental mindset, motivation, etc. Relying on it for stuff like this is problematic in a lot of ways.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ineptech 2y ago

I would definitely take Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and so forth into account in hiring, if I had any faith in my ability to determine those things from the interview process without being fooled. But the only thing I am confident I can find out from a stranger under time constraints without being fooled is "Were you good at this job in your previous role" so I focus on that.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Companies hiring with personality tests are simultaneously telling you their personality. You have absolutely no moral obligation to be truthful with these devices. "Professionalism" is the extent of corporate expectations and intrusion into your thoughts

asdfgadrghae 2y ago

[flagged]

bumby 2y ago

>Certain traits, like conscientiousness and agreeableness, are generally seen as universally positive 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.

ochronus 2y ago

Ah, somebody (again) misspelled “Pseudoscience and hiring”. Stop categorizing people and test for what you want to test for.