model of personality (see p.177) find
that those who score high on consci-
entiousness and low on neuroticism
tend to perform best at work.
The bad news is that there’s a
mismatch between what works in
recruitment and what’s popular.
The most widely used personality
measure is the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator developed by two amateur
psychologists – Katherine Briggs
and her daughter Isabelle Myers – in
the middle of the last century. The
test is used by many of the world’s
largest companies and was taken by
around 200,000 people in Europe
alone in 2009. It’s a crude unreliable
test that shoehorns people into one
of sixteen personality types. The test
has proved so popular largely due to
aggressive marketing and appealing
packaging – not a good evidence
base. It gets worse. In France, it’s
reported that fifty percent of compa-
nies analyse job candidates’ handwriting style – a process known as
graphology – despite there being not one iota of scientific support for
the practice.
Another hurdle confronting successful personnel recruitment is
deliberate fakery. When it comes to personality scales, it’s pretty easy
for most candidates to feign their answers to make themselves sound
appealing. However, in 2008, Jacob Hirsh and Jordan Peterson at the
University of Toronto published a new-style test that pitched appealing
answers against each other, such as: “I rarely get irritated” versus “I am
full of ideas”. This way test respondents were forced to sacrifice some
positive attributes at the expense of others. The new test was found to
predict accurately later school-performance, even when student partici-
pants were asked to fake their answers deliberately to create the best
possible impression.
Of course, psychologists don’t only concern themselves with how
companies can recruit the best people: they also sometimes take the
A 1950s personnel “officer”
interviewing a prospective
candidate for a job at a New Jersey
pharmaceutical firm. Sometime
during the 1960s, US personnel
management was renamed human
resources.