When Charities Use Personality Assessments at Hiring Time, Job Seekers Find No Easy Answers

JOB MARKET

By Alicia Abell

When Kris Huston applied for her job as director of human resources at the Blood Center of Iowa, in Des Moines, she was asked to take a personality-assessment test. She was skeptical. In her 15-year career in administration, she had never used the tests before.

“As an HR professional,” she says, “I’ve never really been a fan of this type of tool.” She doubted that such tests could truly reflect a person’s psychological makeup.

But her experience at the Blood Center, which administers personality tests to all job applicants, caused her to reconsider. When she got the results of her own test back, she says, “It was strange, because it absolutely captured what I believe my strengths and weaknesses are.”

She also saw data showing that the Blood Center had much higher employee turnover when it hired against the recommendation of its testing company. Today, Ms. Huston uses personality tests on a regular basis when evaluating job seekers — and considers them an integral part of her selection process.

Between one-quarter and one-third of U.S. companies administer some kind of pre-employment test, often a personality assessment, according to surveys by the Society for Human Resource Management and the American Management Association. Although the percentage of charities that administer such assessments is believed to be lower than those figures, nonprofit employers also give the tests to job seekers, particularly when selecting candidates for top-level positions.

One reason more charities don’t use personality assessments is the tests’ cost — several hundred to several thousand dollars per candidate. Charities “just can’t justify it to their boards,” says Jane Howard, who co-founded CentACS, a testing company in Charlotte, N.C., with her husband, Pierce Howard. Amicus, a Minneapolis organization that provides services to inmates and former inmates of Minnesota correctional facilities, used to administer personality tests until the cost became prohibitive, says Louise Wolfgramm, the group’s president. In particular, investing time and money in a testing company’s services may not make sense for an organization that hires only infrequently, says Camye Mackey, vice president of human resources at Special Olympics, in Washington, which does not require job applicants to undergo personality assessments.

Some charity executives also believe that they are better than corporate officials at assessing a person’s cultural fit with their organization, says Jay Berger, a recruiter in Pasadena, Calif., who works exclusively with nonprofit clients. Consequently, he says, they don’t believe testing would add much value to their selection process.

Finally, some organizations oppose personality testing on principle. Ann Hilton Fisher, executive director of the AIDS Legal Council of Chicago, says she would “die first” before administering the tests. “I think they’re appalling,” she says. “They tend to be discriminatory, they’re not reliable at all, and they’re an expensive financial scam. Some things I’m glad we can’t afford.”

Some nonprofit consultants say that bigger charities, which are better able to absorb the expense of testing, are more likely to use the assessments than smaller ones. Others believe the composition of a charity’s board — not the organization’s size — is the determining factor.

“Typically, the connection comes through a board member whose own company uses personality tests,” says James Martin Haygood, co-founder of Management Psychology Group, an Atlanta firm that makes hiring recommendations based on tests and other means of evaluation.

Charities also turn to personality assessments when they have made selection mistakes in the past, says Ms. Howard. Or they’re simply looking for what she calls “risk minimization.” That is the case at the Georgia Center for Children, an Atlanta organization that serves young clients who have experienced sexual abuse. Because the center’s work involves frequent collaboration with other organizations, it needs employees who value teamwork, says LaVann Landrum, the center’s executive director. “Sometimes we get people who are so incredibly independent that that might be difficult for them,” she says, “and we want to ensure that everyone that we place can be successful in the job we place them in.”

Testing 101

Some personality-assessment tests are particularly popular with employers, says Jordon Levin, a psychologist at the Adler School of Professional Psychology, in Chicago. The most widely used include the 16 Personality Factor (commonly referred to as the 16PF), the Global Personality Inventory, and the Entrepreneurial Quotient Questionnaire. According to Mr. Levin, the 16PF and the Global Personality Inventory contain some 300 questions and take close to an hour to complete. Items on the 16PF ask for answers to specific questions, while the Global Personality Inventory asks testers to rate various statements on a Likert scale (which includes five options, from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”). The Entrepreneurial Quotient, which analyzes a person’s compatibility with leadership roles, includes about 185 Likert-scale items and takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Other commonly used, shorter assessments include the DISC, whose 28 items ask test takers to pick the words that most and least describe themselves, and the Personality Index, or PI, which features two identical pages listing 90 adjectives. One page asks testers to check the words that describe how they feel others see them, while the other asks them to check the words they feel really describe themselves.

At the Blood Center of Iowa, where the PI is used, every job is analyzed and has an “ideal profile” of behaviors and motivations, says Ms. Huston. Once a candidate’s test has been processed, the results are compared with the employer’s profile for the job it is planning to fill. When she is filling a quality-assurance position, for example, Ms. Huston looks for a detail-oriented person. She wouldn’t necessarily eliminate a candidate who scored low on that part of the test, she says, but she would use the results to develop specific interview questions.

“With the low-detail person, I would ask a lot more in an interview about how he or she has handled details, even if he or she has had a quality-assurance job in the past.” she says. “For example: ‘What kind of things have you been responsible for? ‘“

The process is similar when charities work with outside consultants to administer a personality test. First, they determine the characteristics that are key to a specific job. After identifying the gaps between test results and the specified characteristics, the charity can tailor interview questions, as well as formulate queries for a person’s references. If someone’s test results indicate that crisis management isn’t a strong suit, for example, the charity might ask that person’s current supervisors, subordinates, and peers how she has handled crises in the past, says John Paul, an executive-search consultant at Association Works, in Dallas, which offers a variety of management-support services to nonprofit clients. Some organizations even identify one or two “knockout factors,” notes CentACS’s Pierce Howard: If candidates don’t score within a broad range on one of those factors, they are out of the running.

Rating the Results

Most nonprofit organizations that use personality tests give them only to finalists for senior positions such as executive director and development director. In general, charities look for candidates who show traits similar to those sought for executives in the corporate world, says Mr. Haygood. These include a high energy level, broad skills and interests, self-discipline, and the ability to relate well to others.

The needs of specific jobs may push employers to emphasize other traits as well. Herbert Greenberg, president of the testing company Caliper in Princeton, N.J., tells organizations that are looking for fund raisers to choose someone whose test results indicate a natural sales personality, and to weigh that along with experience. “The fact that they’ve done fund raising for a nonprofit before doesn’t mean they’re good at it,” he says.

Sometimes what a charity is looking for depends on its current stage of growth, says Mr. Paul. An organization might generally prefer kind, soft-hearted employees, but that’s not who it would look for in a turnaround situation, which usually requires firing people, says Mr. Haygood. In some cases, organizations worry about the filling the shoes of a beloved, departing executive director, says Ms. Howard. In that situation, she says, they might test the outgoing leader and look for someone with a similar personality profile.

Test Takers’ Rights

Test consultants stress that personality assessments should only be part of the hiring process — but, legally, employers can use the results as they please. An employer has the right not to hire someone for any reason except sex, national origin, race, religion, disability, or age, says Brad Seligman, a lawyer for the victorious plaintiffs in a 1993 lawsuit challenging the Target Corporation’s use of testing. (In some states, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is also prohibited.) As long as a test does not have a discriminatory effect on specific classes of people (yielding the same results for everyone of the same race, for example) and is not administered in a discriminatory fashion (given only to members of certain groups), candidates can be denied a job based on its results, Mr. Seligman says. “People can see this as an excuse to hire or not hire a person,” echoes Mr. Paul.

But consultants and human-resources directors insist that applicants are rarely denied jobs solely because of a personality test. According to Mr. Haygood, about 70 percent of the people his company recommends get hired, while 60 to 65 percent of those it recommends with reservation are hired. About 15 percent of people it recommends against hiring, he says, also get job offers.

Job candidates are legally allowed to refuse to take a personality test, but they rarely do, consultants say. They suspect — correctly — that their refusal to submit to a test will be reported to their potential employer, says Richard Furr, an organizational-development consultant who works mainly with boards. Few organizations look favorably upon such refusals, say consultants and nonprofit employers, and such a refusal can eliminate a job seeker from consideration.

While prospective employees have a legal right to choose whether to take a personality test, they usually don’t have the right to see the results, says Mr. Seligman. In some states, employers are required to show job candidates their results — but only if they are hired, and only if they ask. However, test takers are almost never allowed to see the test itself after they have finished taking it, Mr. Seligman says. Most testing companies give clients the option of sending reports to all test takers, but only 30 to 50 percent of organizations choose to do so, probably because of the extra cost, say the Howards and Mr. Greenberg.

People denied jobs because of test results have been largely unsuccessful in court, according to Scott Finlinson, an Ohio University researcher who has studied thousands of cases. One exception is people who were given psychological tests that unnecessarily invaded their privacy or were aimed at discovering a pathological condition, says Mr. Seligman. In 1993, Target agreed to pay more than $1-million to some 2,500 prospective employees who were asked questions about their sexual practices and religious beliefs.

Unfortunately, however, for the most part job seekers wield little control over the personality-testing process, says Mr. Furr. “All you can do is to ask the question about how the test is used,” he says, “and choose to go along or opt out.”

Does your charity use personality-assessments tests to evaluate job candidates? Why or why not? Share your thoughts on the issue in the Job Market online forum.