Help Wanted: Must Test Well

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LUKE BURBANK, host:

Okay, Ali, remember when you were trying to get this hosting gig?

ALISON STEWART, host:

Oh, yes.

BURBANK: To put it nicely, NPR be serious about having you do like 300 interviews…

STEWART: I think it may have been that many.

BURBANK: …and the checking and the rechecking of the references.

STEWART: Call people that weren't even on my reference list.

BURBANK: I think you said - one of them said to you something, like, these people like you, right, that they want to hire you.

STEWART: Yeah.

BURBANK: They felt personally hurt by the - how rigorous the process was. Okay, but - being that as it is, what would you have done, if as part of the interview, NPR had given you a questionnaire to fill out with questions like this: True or false - I would like to be married to a protective and sympathetic person. Or, true or false - Sometimes, I feel like stepping into mud and letting it ooze between my toes.

STEWART: I would have run screaming in traffic. That's what I would have done.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BURBANK: Those are actual questions.

STEWART: I'd still be back in the "Today" show. Good morning, Lester. Good morning, Campbell. Good morning everybody.

BURBANK: I failed that question. That's why I couldn't get hired on the "Today" show. I said I did like having mud ooze between my toes. Those are actual questions of it.

Somebody sent Marci Alboher of the New York Times. She prompted it was part of a blog post that she wrote about these increasingly personal and bizarre psychological tests that companies are giving to their would-be employees. Since Alboher wrote this post on her Shifting Careers blog on the New York Times Web site, there'd been all kinds of comments from people who've gotten these weird questionnaires, and we're thinking there are lots of questions about the sort of ethical and moral implications of these tests. So we've got Marci here to talk to us about it.

Hi, Marci.

Ms. MARCI ALBOHER (Blogger, New York Times; Author, "One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success"): Hi, Luke.

BURBANK: So describe some of these tests that people are getting.

Ms. ALBOHER: Yeah, I mean, I am - I actually had to consult with an expert on personality test because I am not an expert on personality test. So I called Annie Murphy Paul, who wrote "The Cult of Personality," who gave me a little backgrounder on what's going on in it. According to Ms. Paul, these tests are getting more and more pervasive in the employment sector.

And what strange is they write about careers, and I haven't run into a lot of people telling me they had these kinds of tests. But there's everything from the kind of hundreds of questions, questionnaire, personality inventories of the kind where you read those questions that I excerpted in the blog post to things that feel more innocuous like a Myers-Briggs Test, which we all think of as not very scary, and you might be getting that as part of a career development tool, right, to help you figure out what your strengths are and your affinities.

And I think a lot of this is there's such a broad spectrum that I was finding that the way the test were used, the setting they were used, the communication around the test, the administration of the test, whether there really was competence or policies around it and explanations about confidentiality, there were so many issues around it when people started - when we started talking about it that it was just - it's hard to make sense of the whole thing because…

BURBANK: Well, what do you think companies are trying to deduce with these tests?

Ms. ALBOHER: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think in the most noble sense is they're trying to find whether people are a good fit for certain kinds of jobs, and I think that's kind of the defense of these kind of tests. I mean, obviously, if we're trying to find out about criminal tendencies, we could do background checks, and we've always done things like that. So I think we're also looking at, you know, this era where what's called soft skills are becoming increasingly important at work.

STEWART: What are soft skills?

Ms. ALBOHER: Do you get along with people, you know? Are you nice? How are you interpersonal skills? And sometimes, you know, we're putting so much emphasis on these things we wonder if it's more important than can you do the job you were hired to do, and have you done it well in the past in other settings?

STEWART: I have to ask, though, I'm looking to this question that asks to whom I like to be married, the type of person - could that possibly be a legal question?

BURBANK: Right.

Ms. ALBOHER: Yeah, yeah, I mean…

STEWART: You're corporate lawyer so I thought…

Ms. ALBOHER: I was a lawyer, but I had to call an employment lawyer to ask about some of the legal guidelines. And really the legal minefields are around things that have to do with discrimination against protected class. So…

BURBANK: Not wanting to marry a caring person…

Ms. ALBOHER: I'm not sure - yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, the lawyer says, you know, when he advises companies he's really concerned about medical information, obviously, you know, things that would have to do with sexual orientation or racial or other kinds of gender discrimination. So I'm not sure that particular question was necessarily on the no-no list, but when I described him the situation that the person called me about it - it was five hours of test - of meeting…

STEWART: Oh my.

Ms. ALBOHER: …with a psychologist to go through these questions.

BURBANK: And this was for a job at Wendy's.

Ms. ALBOHER: Yeah…

(Soundbite of laughter)

STEWART: It wasn't even the Defense Department…

BURBANK: (Unintelligble).

STEWART: …or someplace that's…

Ms. ALBOHER: Well, this job didn't have any security implications. It was a job in the financial sector of, you know, a high-level, white-collar…

BURBANK: Uh-huh.

Ms. ALBOHER: …position actually. And when I heard more of the details - and I can't reveal the person because she did come to me confidentially - but when I heard more of the details about it, it just showed me how we're in the Wild West of these things. You know, like this was, you know, a 12-person financial firm that seemed to administer the test maybe because they had a relationship with this psychologist.

BURBANK: Mm-hmm.

Ms. ALBOHER: And that psychologist had a lot of power in the interview process. The psychologist, who is not an investment professional herself, was now judging this person based on how she performed on a test and whether she thought her investment decisions would be sound based on questions like the ones you just hurled(ph)…

BURBANK: Well, that's the thing…

Ms. ALBOHER: …be playing back to me.

BURBANK: The thing I don't get is how they think that they're going to get honest answers of - out of someone who's trying to get a job, like, oh, that dream I have about my mom marrying Tom Cruise that really means I'm great at using Excel.

Ms. ALBOHER: Well…

BURBANK: How do you get it with all of the answers?

Ms. ALBOHER: And that was the other thing I talked about with this candidate, so how honest was she in the psychological kind of in-take session. And she said, well, there were certain things I talked about and certain things I didn't talk about.

So she revealed some things about her family history, but there were some things she wasn't going near because she wasn't sure what they were going to make of them. So I don't know how honest an assessment you're even getting. And I think, like, when we all sit down to take tests, I mean, look at all the studying, an industry that has grown abound around college testing and graduate school testing, we try to gain tests so…

STEWART: And it's an extension of your job interview. I mean, you never say I was fired. You say, I - we left on good terms, or I decided to seek other opportunities. Wouldn't you approach the test the same way?

BURBANK: Yeah.

Ms. ALBOHER: Right. And, I mean, when I talked to some experts about the tests…

BURBANK: That inkblot looks like my former boss whom I respect tremendously.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. ALBOHER: So you know, the thing with these tests once they're filled with other questions is there's a lot of decoy questions along the way, so the questions are kind of reversed engineered. So if you're trying the gain the test, you won't be able to do it because they'll catch you.

I mean, the people I talked to who really work with these tests, there is some faith in it there. People in the career industry and lots of organizational psychologists wrote to me, e-mailed me, and posted comments saying, you know, with proper training, these tests can be very valuable in certain instances, but they seem like a tool that can be really easily abused. So I don't have a comprehensive answer for you on all this except that it made the readers and job candidates really uncomfortable.

BURBANK: Yeah, it did. Things were just going…

Ms. ALBOHER: Going crazy and…

BURBANK: …nuts on your blog.

Ms. ALBOHER: …and the - and people in the industries themselves, and they can't tell whether this is to control the use of the test and to create a cadre(ph) of consultants around this, or a real, kind of, professional accountability feel that these kind of tests and the analysis requires so much expertise that you really want a random HR person being the evaluator, and it's really important who's the test taker, who's the test evaluator, who gets access to the results of these kinds of tests. And I use the word test broadly. They're called inventories. There are all these names for what…

STEWART: Okay, what the names that are - where (unintelligible) if somebody starts saying, I'm going to do an inventory when you come in…

Ms. ALBOHER: Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BURBANK: Okay.

Ms. ALBOHER: This one - the one that had the mud mushiness is called the PRS Form E, and that's - you could go to the Web site of SIGMA Assessment Systems and see a lot of these tests.

BURBANK: SIGMA.

Ms. ALBOHER: I've been poking around all last night. I was, like, I want to look at more of these tests.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. ALBOHER: It's just incredible.

BURBANK: All right, Marci, we're getting really short on time, but I just have a question. If someone finds themselves sitting across from a Minnesota Multiphasic, is there something they can remember - a guiding principle - to try to gain this thing a little bit?

Ms. ALBOHER: You know what? I really think the bigger question is: When you're done with it, just start thinking about how the test made you feel, and if you want to work with people who think how you performed on that test is really important.

BURBANK: Okay. And the final question: Do you like stepping into the mud and letting it ooze between your toes?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. ALBOHER: One of my favorite things to do.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BURBANK: All right.

STEWART: We know which way to wind blows in New York Times now, don't we?

Ms. ALBOHER: I was going to say let's see how my editors respond to that.

BURBANK: Marci Alboher writes the Shifting Careers blog on the New York Times Web site. She's also the author of "One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success."

Thanks, Marci.

Ms. ALBOHER: Thanks so much.

STEWART: Thanks for coming to the studio.

Hey, we're getting the latest from inside of Pakistan, so much going on there this morning as well. We'll take a ramble through some of the news you can't really use but we know you like it.

Stay with us here at THE BRYANT PARK PROJECT from NPR News.

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