Should You Ditch Self-Report Questionnaires? Rethinking Employee Profiles with John Power
“Pick the one that makes it seem like the customer is definitely right,” I answered.
I was 17 and working at a Staples. My girlfriend, the same age, was also trying to land a job at Staples. She had called me to help her out with the online personality test, a massive beast of a questionnaire that would try any reasonable person’s patience. She figured that because I had successfully navigated the test and gotten a job at the office supply store, I should be able to help her do the same.
So we went through each question together as I tried to recall how I answered each one.
As with any company that puts job candidates through such tests, Staples was trying to identify candidates who had personalities that closely mirrored the ideal Staples associate. My girlfriend and I were gaming the system, giving Staples the answers we thought they wanted – not truthful insights into who she was.
I didn’t feel bad doing this. Staples is a giant faceless corporation, and I don’t feel much empathy for those. Also, gaming the system was how I got my job as a cashier. I was a teenage misanthrope who needed money for illicitly purchased cigarettes. I did not want to work at Staples. I just needed a paycheck. So I lied through my teeth on my self-report questionnaire and, hey, look at that: Staples hired me.
Self-report questionnaires, a favorite method of pre-employment personality assessment, are generally considered to be fairly reliable. Indeed, the much more rigorous field of psychology often uses self-report questionnaires? Why shouldn’t business use them as well?
It turns out that self-report questionnaires can be easily exploited by those with unscrupulous intents. I speak, of course, as someone who exploited such questionnaires in the past, and I also point to non-profit organization Science Brainwaves, which details the dangers of self-report questionnaires in a post on its blog.
Even people who aren’t consciously trying to exploit these questionnaires can give inaccurate information for a variety of reasons: misunderstanding the questions, misunderstanding themselves, their mood that day, and so on. John Power, founder and director of the New Zealand-based behavioral profiling consultancy Profile One, has seen the failures of self-report questionnaires firsthand. “In my opinion and my experience, self-report questionnaires, when it comes to personality traits, are inherently flawed, simply because when someone is choosing their own, they’re essentially deciding which traits and behaviors they display,” he says. “People are pretty biased toward themselves. The image that they have of themselves is actually very different from the way that they actually behave in any environment, but especially the workplace.”
For this reason, Power, who worked in sales, finance, and real estate before studying psychology and neuro-linguistic programming, designed the Employee Selection & Management Profile, or ESM-P. Based heavily on concepts from the field of neuro-linguistic programming, the ESM-P differs from most other employee personality assessments in one very important way: it is administered to candidates by employees of Profile One, who then determine a candidate’s personality profile based on their answers. “We don’t rely on self-report questionnaires,” Power says. “Instead, a consultant decides which personality traits a candidate or an employee has based on the answers they give during a live interview.”
Digging Deep into Candidates’ Psyches
The ESM-P, Power explains, is a heavy-duty assessment for the job market. It isn’t something you run every applicant through. Rather, it’s a way to really learn as much as possible about your shortlist candidates.
When a company hires Profile One, the first thing to do is build a profile of the role being filled. That way, consultants from Profile One can compare candidate personality profiles to the personality profile of an ideal employee for the role. “Before we even interview any candidates, we sit down with the employer and figure out, ‘What are the ideal traits you’d like for a person to have in this role?’” Power says.
Creating an ideal personality profile is important, Power says, because it allows companies to understand and make use of the personality profiles of the actual candidates. “Otherwise, [the profiles are] just information, and [they] may not necessarily be in context,” Power says.
Once an ideal personality profile is constructed, consultants administer the ESM-P to the candidates using live profiling methods based in neuro-linguistic programming, a school of thought that believes human beings experience and interact with the world according to a dynamic set of interactions between the mind, language, experience, and behavior. “We assess people via the language they use, their body language, even their eye movement sometimes,” Power explains. “We don’t ask someone what they’re like in a certain situation. We ask someone to re-experience a situation, and then we decide how they behave.”
Power notes that neuro-linguistic is “a bit left field of mainstream psychology.” Indeed, many opponents of neuro-linguistic programming consider it a pseudoscience. “Academia tends to be uncomfortable with people assessing other people. They’d like there to be a standardized test where people tick boxes on exactly the same test. That helps for consistency,” Power says. “However, when it comes to assessing human beings and the mind of another human, it really takes another human to do that.”
While the scientific community may not be entirely keen on neuro-linguistic programming, businesses and business analysts say applying the tenets of neuro-linguistic programming to professional practice can lead to great results. Power says that, in his experience and in the experience of the employers he’s worked with, the neuro-linguistic programming-based ESM-P has been “more accurate in assessing the way that someone will behave in a role once they’re in a job” than traditional self-report questionnaires.
“So lot of companies use psychometric testing, and what I observed was that these personality tests, at least — they just didn’t work,” Power says. “They were interesting to read about someone … [b]ut they wouldn’t serve the purpose of predicting who would work out and who wouldn’t.”
The increased accuracy of a test like the ESM-P comes from its ability to assess candidates in a more “indirect” and deeply reaching way, Power says. “We can assess the metaphors in their language. We can look at their body language. We can really get a much more accurate feel for the way that they behave and the way that they are likely to behave on the job,” he adds.
Power also sees value in the way his test is tailored to each company, taking the time to first construct an ideal personality profile before profiling candidates. “Some personality traits can be very important in some roles, but completely unimportant in other roles,” he says.