MarketWatch, September 14, 2011, Wednesday

MarketWatch

September 14, 2011, Wednesday

MarketWatch (full article)

Job seekers, get ready for personality tests
More employers are using pre-hire assessments

“Sometimes companies will put in a kind of nonsense question to make sure people are paying attention,” said John Hausknecht, Associate Professor of Human Resource Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Tests don’t have the final say

“Bombing” a personality assessment won’t necessarily lose you a job, experts said.

“For companies that manage their staffing system well, personality tests are going to be a small part of the process,” Hausknecht said. With assessments, “there is no one magic bullet that works for all people and all jobs. Personality tests might be combined with an interview, plus some kind of a work sample.”