Where do you stand on the Big Five? How neurotic, extroverted, agreeable, conscientious and open to experience do you really think you are? Completed that task?

Okay, now you’d better rate yourself on Raymond Cattell’s 16 personality factors – warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, dominance and so on. When you’ve done that, there’s this occupational personality questionnaire to fill in and, just to be on the safe side, you’d better do the Hogan personality inventory. Talent Q’s Dimensions test should round that off nicely and then we can run the whole thing through an Activ8 meta-analysis and, all being well, we can start the interviewing process.

Oh, and by the way, do you ever turn up late for meetings? No. Sorry, wrong answer, close the door behind you.

Welcome to the weird world of psychometrics. If you want to work for a big company there’s at least a 70% chance that before being given a job you will be subjected to a personality test by one of the big four – MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), 16PF (16 personality factors), OPQ (occupational personality questionnaire) or Hogan – and an ability exam measuring verbal reasoning and numeracy. These are basically IQ tests by another name.

Soon all big companies will be doing this, as well as increasing numbers of small ones. And don’t say you just want to be a shelf stacker – that job is also being psychometricated.

Modern life and particularly the corporate world is awash with this psychobabble and the business is booming. Why? Well, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters, it’s because nobody trusts university degrees any more. It has just issued a report saying degree standards are inconsistent and, as a result, companies are turning to psychometrics. But Ceri Roderick at occupation psychologists Pearn Kandola adds two other reasons.

“Companies want to know things like the motivational characteristics of recruits and the technology is now available to do these things.”

There’s also a fourth reason: the need to compete for quality recruits. “There’s a war for talent,” says Professor David Bartram of the British Psychological Society (BPS), “companies are fighting to get the best people.”

All of which means there is now a rapid proliferation of psychometrics consultancies, most of them offering candidates the chance to do all the tests online. There’s also intense competition to come up with better, faster, more technologically sophisticated tests. And, with online testing, new artificially intelligent systems are being introduced. For example, using item response theory, these machines can adapt questions in response to your answers. The job interview with Marvin the paranoid android cannot be not far away.

Sceptics think the whole enterprise is misguided. In America a book – The Cult of Personality by Annie Murphy Paul – has cast doubt on the intellectual credibility of psychometrics.

“Remember,” she writes, “that promoters of the tests – from the Rorschach to today’s inventories of the Big Five – have claimed for nearly a century that they possess an x-ray of personality. But in truth...the x-ray is more like a mirror, reflecting mostly the testers’ own needs and wants. The tests say more about them than they do about us.”

In support of Paul’s book the author Malcolm Gladwell questions the very idea of measuring personality: “We have a personality in the sense that we have a consistent pattern of behaviour. But that pattern is complex and that personality is contingent: it represents an interaction between our internal disposition and tendencies and the situations that we find ourselves in.”

So what does it all mean? Is this industry all snake oil and superstition or are psychometric tests a serious recruitment tool?

First, let’s be clear, there is a lot of snake oil and superstition. Most of the personality tests you can find free online are useless. I did a few and they came up with exactly the personality I was trying to force on them by manipulating my answers. They’re fun in a horoscope kind of way – try a few at www.queendom.com if you fancy it – but they’re a warning that the industry boom makes psychometrics vulnerable to the usual cast of hucksters.

But are Gladwell and Paul right to question the whole theory on which they are based? The history of psychometrics marches hand in hand with the history of IQ testing. Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, produced the first modern IQ test in 1905 and Walter Dill Scott subjected 15 engineering graduates to the first psychometric test in 1915. Both ideas were inspired by the conviction that there could be no reason why the human mind should be impervious to scientific investigation.

The IQ test has since been subjected to wave after wave of scorn, most commonly because it is seen as absurd to pretend to be able to reduce a phenomenon as complex as intelligence to a single figure, but also because results were found to vary from culture to culture and time to time. Nevertheless the idea survives in, among other places, the ability tests used by psychometricians. As Steve O’Dell of the occupational psychology consultants Talent Q says: “Studies have shown that intelligence testing is the single greatest predictor of employee long-term potential.”

This is true but it is a statement that has to be treated with extreme caution. What it emphatically cannot mean is that we have found any universal system of measuring intelligence. What it means is that we have found a system that fits the expectations of our society.

The psychometric faith that we have cracked the human personality by reducing it to five or 16 categories is equally misleading. As with the IQ tests, we have simply found a system that works in the context of a modern highly developed society. Any idea that occupational or educational psychologists have come up with some universal and timeless metric for the human mind is pure superstition.

There is no doubt, however, that within the narrow parameters of employee selection, psychometrics – using both personality and ability components – works. This is because it is not really your personality as such that is being measured, but rather those detectable inclinations and abilities that may indicate you will be right for a specific job.

Making them do this has been quite an achievement because psychometric testing of the personality began with superstition. The MBTI test, for example, was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter solely on the basis of a reading of Carl Jung’s Psychological Types. This suggested there were specific personality categories. Cattell, an Anglo-American psychologist, developed the 16PR test using 16 personality factors. And all the tests can be said to adhere to the Big Five list of key personality attributes.

This is interesting but it is emphatically not science. Types are not inside the mind, they are merely terms that allow us to describe a certain limited number of interactions between the mind and the world.

Furthermore, testees’ subsequent responses can be distorted by what is known as the Forer effect. As with astrology or palm reading, people tend to believe anything they are told about their personality and, consequently, if you tell them they have a type X personality they will behave as if they have. In some firms employees all know their MBTI rating – a sign that they are letting the test create rather than measure reality.

Nevertheless, the tests are not necessarily dependent on a background of dubious theory because their methods are in fact quite subtle. One typical test method is to use forced choice questions. So, for example, you might be asked what you are most like – strong, enthusiastic, caring or questioning. If you answer “strong” you will then be asked which of the remaining three you are least like and so on. Or you will be asked to rate the statement “I often like to watch team games” as true, false or don’t know.

To measure your honesty level in answering you will also be asked to rate statements such as “I am never late for any meeting”. Since everybody is occasionally late for a meeting, if you say this is true then you’re clearly trying too hard to please the examiner. The safe answer is yes.

But the one big question I put to half a dozen psychometricians was: if everybody is taking these tests, won’t they learn to do them better or indeed cheat more effectively? The answers were a) no and b) there is no point.

It is true, they said, that you can improve yourself by practising ability tests in advance, but you can only go so far. Ultimately you either can or cannot do verbal reasoning or handle numbers. On personality tests, you cannot improve or even cheat because there are no right answers. Your results will either fit you for the job or they won’t, but if they don’t it’s as much in your interests as the company’s that you’re not selected.

But won’t all this testing simply turn your workforce into a drab, homogenised bunch of slavish test-passers? Won’t they cut out the real geniuses? For example, having spoken to Bill Gates at length, I have serious doubts about whether he would end up being selected.

No, says John Hackston of OPP, the second biggest testing company after SHL, because the tests do not exclude genius. They simply find the basic necessities for doing the job – genius is neither excluded nor included. “We are not looking for a cardboard cut-out,” he says, “nor a piece to fit into a jigsaw puzzle.”

Psychometrics works, but only if the tests are properly applied, rigorously interpreted and accompanied by traditional interviews. This means they do not necessarily speed up the recruitment process. They might, however, help weed out unsuitables in advance, a huge benefit at a time when all companies are swamped with applicants for attractive jobs.

But we have to tread very carefully indeed down this road, especially now that new psychometric consultancies with new gimmicks are appearing almost daily. The potential for abuse is limitless. In my view, psychometrics is already being seriously abused by those companies that ask employees to be tested after having been made to reapply for their own jobs. This is, scientifically and morally, insane.

Above all, nobody should fall into the trap of thinking it is your actual personality that is being measured. That way lies madness, superstition and zombie-like submission to a technocratic dictatorship. All that is being measured is your conformity with a limited number of correlations between test scores and workplace performance.

Analyse this

Do you pick your nose when you’re alone?

This has probably never been used but it’s an example of a test question to which the right answer is yes. This shows honesty.

I often like to watch team games. True, false or don’t know?

A typical question designed to find how much of a team player you might be. But “true” may not be the right answer as they might be looking for an individualist.

Who are you?

Never been asked, but if it ever is, answer: “I don’t know and, more to the point, you never will.”

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