The $3 billion question of who you are at work

At Scotiabank, which has 90,000 workers, executives decided in late 2020 to stop looking at resumes for applicants coming out of school. The campus hiring program is now focused partly on Plum results, and the new approach is bringing in more diverse candidates, the bank said, because hiring managers are looking beyond familiar credentials. The share of Scotiabank’s new employees who are Black rose to 6 per cent from 1 per cent, and over half of its hires are women.

Acolytes of personality testing are cautious, though, about how results should be used for workplace decision-making. They should be one factor among many, advocates say, with the understanding that there’s a gap between the way people present themselves on a test and how they’ll act on any given Tuesday, or in a fight on Slack.

Critics are quick to point out that some of the tests, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which churns out four-letter distillations of personality, are about as reliable at predicting success in a professional endeavour as sorting candidates by astrological signs or Magic 8 Balls. Investigations by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have uncovered bias at play in some hiring processes that overly relied on personality tests without scholarly psychological backing.

But personality testing has also become more rigorous in recent years. Organisational psychologists have developed assessments that are more fair and grounded in research. Some of these tests use the “Big Five” personality traits, which psychologists have found to be consistent across populations: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

“Human behaviour is complex, people are complex, situations are complex,” said Ben Dattner, an organisational psychologist and executive coach, noting that studying personalities in all their complexity is still helpful for career development. “Psychometrics can help identify what are some potential areas where a person might need coaching or feedback, or where a person might have blind spots.”

And plenty of companies hail their benefits. Nearly one-third of the respondents to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2017 survey of its members said they used personality tests to fill executive roles. At McKinsey & Co., some consultants do “due diligence” when staffing projects, which often means looking at the balance of introverts and extroverts on a team. There’s a running joke that the company is full of people who got ENTJ on Myers-Briggs (the extroverted and organised type of person most likely to run for student council president). College fundraising offices love the Colour Code, which among other things tells you who can best work the phones (yellows).

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Often, the tests aren’t a diagnosis but are more of an opening for people to talk about the softer parts of office life: their relationships. Identifying as a Blue, through the Colour Code, might not feel all that relevant to quarterly sales quotas — but at least, among teammates, it can be a conversation starter.

“The biggest thing that hit me over the head was that I really care about people’s perceptions,” said Robyn Ross, the head of people and talent at Burgundy Asset Management, describing her experience taking the PrinciplesYou assessment, which revealed that she is an “inspirer”. “My natural inclination is to take care of people.”

To Ross, that result explained why it had been so hard for her to call Burgundy’s 150 employees back to the office. “Asking people to do things they don’t naturally want to do was quite tough for me,” she said. “It has been such a godsend to see it through this test.”

Caitlin MacGregor, who co-founded Plum, a research-backed testing company, attributes her initial zest for personality testing to an experiment she conducted for a previous employer. She winnowed a pool of 80 job applicants down to two: one who stood out on a resume and one who stood out in a psychometric assessment. She hired both; her boss had said the cost of picking the wrong person was $300,000. The applicant who outperformed on the psychometric test rose to the company’s top ranks within a year and a half.

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MacGregor argues that an element of equity can be built into testing, when it’s done right, because it can identify “diamonds in the rough” who have natural abilities instead of fancy degrees. This can be even more essential when interviewers aren’t meeting candidates in person.

“For a long time, people were comfortable making decisions around talent based on face-to-face interactions,” she said. “More and more companies have a distributed workforce. It’s harder than ever to get to know your people.”

In a territory as fraught as personality — how people are and could be — it’s no surprise that disagreements have sprung up as the tests have spread. Psychologists argue over the validity and fairness of different assessments and, recently, whether the tests have kept pace with the changing workplace and workforce. After all, a test developed a century ago might be tough to use for gauging whether an employee will feel fulfilled if she never meets her boss except on Zoom.

In remote workplaces, “it’s a different style of working, which means different characteristics will matter,” said Matt Spencer, who in 2019 started a personality testing company called Suited. “Initiative, self-direction, ability to manage one’s time, the way somebody collaborates.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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