Question 1

Let’s see the pros and cons of Personality Test.

Pros:

1. Inexpensive method to help managers make important hiring decision.

2. Good Personality Tests are reliable in behavior and performance predictions than interview and resumes.

3. Provide quantitative data that ease the differentiation of individual candidate performance.

Cons:

1. Poor Personality Tests are not reliable and can be faked.

2. Employers may face lawsuits if Personality Tests are used inappropriately, i.e : if the test qualified as a medical exam, whereby there is Act prohibiting the need of medical examinations before hiring.

3. Regional differences are causing difficulties for Personality Tests to differential individual candidate performance accurately.

I don’t think it is a wise decision for Mark to drop the use of Personality Test. Personality test is very important for us to understand the behavior of the candidate in front of us. The personality of the worker and managers will affect day-to-day success of the organization. Actually a good Personality Test with proper usage is really will help Mark to better assessing individual candidate behavior and theirs performance before making the hiring decision. By understanding individual candidate behavior, Mark can achieve the goal of ‘right fit for the right job’. The key point is he must use a good quality Personality Test and use it properly, but not giving up on it. Personality Test is just like a ‘double edges’ sword, it can kill people, also can save them.

Question 2

Job candidates fake on a Personality Test mainly because they are not qualified to hold on the job that they are applying, compared to their competitors who tell the truth. For those highly qualified candidates, there is not much room for them to improve their scores.

Besides, candidates are doing this in order to make themselves look as attractive as possible in front of the prospective employer. They want to put the right image forward.

Also, it is depend on the character of certain types of individual who are very good in fitting in with groups and having fantastic social skill, they will tend to fake it. While for those individuals who are very straightforward and decision-making type, they can’t fake it. Those individuals who do some modest faking on a test could give customer “a social desirable reaction”, and may be a good hire for sales and marketing personnel. But this is not applied to those lie to the extreme.

Those candidates who fake a Personality Test actually know there is no absolute right or wrong answer in most of the tests, so, they will not be caught for doing lie. This increases their tendency to fake it and score higher mark with very little risk.

Some of the Personality Tests are posting questions that are fairly obvious ‘what the employees are looking for’. For example if you are looking for a sales job and being ask the question ‘Do you like to interact with people ?’, by nature, you will answer ‘ I love to interact with people’ even though you are not really like it.

Question 3

Actually the company that I am serving now is using Personality Test (SHL Test) for some management decision, aside hiring. We are using the test results to make decision for individual job promotion and salary adjustment. For promotion to certain job position grades, for example Grade 7 (Executive level) and above, we required the employee to pass the personality test. Without this, said employee will never get to higher level of job position. Definitely, this job promotion is coming with salary adjustment. The magnitude of adjustment also depend on the score of the test. We find this is very useful, compare to conventional job promotion and salary adjustment purely basing on work performance. This method is encouraging employee to have positive behavior, promote teamwork and generate positive business return.

Besides, we are using Personality Test for management decision in measuring employee behavior in accepting new changes. For example if we would to change existing or implement new system, we can run a test to assess the satisfaction of employee to this change. If most of the employees are satisfied and happy with the change, we will implement it. Vice versa, we will consider more before making the change. We find this is very useful instead of forcing the employees to accept changes that they are not happy with.