Posted by Josh Millet on Tue, Apr 14, 2009 @ 07:02 PM
In my last post I described our customer service test and the kinds of personality traits that it measures. People who have high levels of cooperativeness, patience, and personal diplomacy tend to be well suited for customer service roles. The use of personality tests is even more widespread, however, in helping select salespeople, because there's a lot of research that shows that people with certain personality traits tend to be successful in sales roles across a wide range of industries. Most personality tests that are designed to help select salespeople look for outgoing, fairly aggressive people that tend to be competitve and highly motivated. This general profile of a stereotypical sales professional is probably not all that surprising. But what kinds of research underlies this type of "sales profiling?"
The sales aptitude test featured in HireSelect is called the Sales Achievement Predictor. The professors who created the test validated it in part by comparing the 15 personality traits it measures to job performance data for various samples of salespeople. The highest performing salespeople tended to be competitive, outgoing, highly motivated, assertive individuals. For example, in a sample of 156 real estate sales professionals whose test scores were compared to their job performance, the highest correlations were observed in the following traits: Achievement, Motivation, Initiative, Assertiveness, Competitveness, Goal-Orientation, and Extraversion (the correlations were .53, .43, .42, .38, .38, and .36, respectively.) Interestingly, low or even negative correlations were observed for Cooperativeness and Patience, suggesting that when it comes to sales being too patient or too cooperative can sometimes be a liability rather than an asset. We've conducted numerous case studies with our customers that essentially confirm these findings: the most successful salespeople tend to be competitive, assertive, and relatively impatient individuals--in short, nearly the opposite of the type of people who are best suited to customer service. To be sure, the type of personality that is best suited for a particular sales role can vary from one organziation to another, and from one industry to another, depending on the nature of the sales process and the sales culture in a given environment. But the basic building blocks of what personality traits you should look for in selecting sales people are remarkably consistent across all industries.
Click here to read more about our sales aptitude test.
Posted by Wayne Chuen on Wed, Nov 05, 2008 @ 06:31 PM
As a kid, it was fairly well ingrained in me that when taking a test, the goal was to try to achieve the highest possible score. If I received low scores on a test, then it meant I didn't sufficiently understand some concept in algebra or properly comprehend the significance of a novel like Catch-22. In other words, tests served to point out deficiencies, so the higher the test score, the better. However, with pre-employment testing, and personality tests in particular, this is not necessarily true.
One of Criteria's personality tests, the Criteria Personality Inventory (CPI) measures the "Big Five" personality traits - Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Openness, and Stability. Suppose you gave the CPI to two candidates: Amy and Bob. Amy scored in the 25th percentile on Agreeableness and 33rd percentile on Extraversion while Bob scored in the 90th percentile on Agreeableness and 84th percentile on Extraversion. Who is the better candidate?
With how we're accustomed to thinking about tests, it would be easy to reason that since Bob scored higher, he must have done better on the test, and thus, must be the better candidate. However, this is not how personality tests work. The key is to examine the results in tandem with the job description. If you're testing for a position — such as a Customer Service Representative — that requires frequent and pleasant interactions with others, then Bob may be the best candidate because his results point to a personality that is more cooperative and outgoing. If, on the other hand, you're testing for a position that requires objective problem-solving skills and involves little social interaction — such as data analysts, for example — then Amy may be the best candidate because her results point to a personality that is less dependent on social interaction. Because there are no "high" or "low" scores on personality tests, the CPI should be viewed as an evaluation of candidates' personalities, rather than a test they need to ace.
For this reason we recently redesigned the score report for the CPI. Based on customer feedback, we believe the new score report helps emphasize the point that there are no "high" or "low" scores on the CPI. The most significant difference you will notice is the Results Summary graphs. These graphs show where on the spectrum the candidate scored in each of the "Big Five" personality traits. At a glance, you can see how candidates compare to the general population. The Results Snapshot gives you a quick description of the candidate's personality traits based on the results, and the full text for each trait emphasizes how the score should be interpreted. Finally, we added an Interview Guide where appropriate. These questions were designed to help you further probe a candidate if his/her results don't seem to correspond with the type of personality demanded by a certain job.
We hope you'll find these new score reports more useful and informative. If you have any questions, give us a call or leave a comment below.
Posted by Josh Millet on Thu, Oct 02, 2008 @ 12:21 PM
Just Who Lives in Alaska Anyhow?
A recent article in The Week entitled "Sizing Up the Last
Frontier" notes that "after John McCain tapped Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be
his running mate, the nation took a sudden interest in the quirky 49th
state," and asks "How is Alaska different than the lower 48?"
Well, Alaska has always attracted hunters, oil drillers, and
gold miners, and men outnumber women there by a margin of 7 to 6. Alaskans consider themselves to be rugged
individualists, and there's good reason for this: the state covers 656,424
square miles and has only 683,000 inhabitants. More than 60% of Alaskans were
born elsewhere; in other words most Alaskans chose to live in the vast,
beautiful and empty expanse they call home.
What kind of people make this choice? In our last blog post
we commented on the Wall Street Journal article that summarized a recent study on personality with 600,000 internet
volunteers from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We discussed the state level rankings on
personality traits such as agreeableness, openness and extraversion, and
pointed out that there was a tendency for the states with smaller numbers of
respondents to show up at the higher and lower ends of the rankings.
But even accounting for increased variance in small states,
the data from Alaska stands out from the rest. Alaska scored 49th in
extraversion, 51st in agreeableness, 51st in
conscientiousness, 47th in neuroticism, and 49th in
openness. That's consistency--49th state indeed! It also makes you wonder a bit about how seriously
the 4000 Alaskans were answering the survey.
With respect to agreeableness and conscientiousness, Alaska
didn't just rank last in both, their scores were more than 3 standard deviations lower
than the mean—very few states were more than one standard deviation off. Take a
look at the plot below where we've shown how the states look on agreeableness
and conscientiousness. The red dot is
Alaska.
According to the data, then, Alaskans consider themselves much less
agreeable and conscientious than their compatriots in the lower 48. But
before we take any angry calls from the Alaskan Tourism Board, our point here
is not to highlight Alaska's singularity, but to use Alaska as an example of
how a single outlier can affect the conclusions one draws
from a small sample size. What impact could Alaska have on the national scene
when the personality measures are correlated with health, crime and business
measures? This what statisiticians are refering to when they call something influential.
According to the plot,
Alaska is as far removed from the other states psychologically as it is
geographically. It is showing the same
trend as the rest of the data shows, in that low scores on agreeableness seem
to be associated with low scores on conscientiousness. But Alaska's position on the graph
exaggerates that trend. When you include
Alaska, the correlation between the two personality traits is r = .66. When you remove it, the correlation is r = .56. Like we said, in this case Alaska doesn't
change how you would look at the data (you'd come to the same conclusion that
there is a positive association), but it does affect the strength of the
conclusion.
By contrast, look at a
plot of the national data for conscientiousness plotted against neuroticism. The
trend is that the less conscientious a state is, the more neurotic they appear
to be. However, in this case Alaska (the
red point) bucks the trend. Including
Alaska, the correlation is r = -.27; excluding Alaska the correlation is r = -.38. Here, according to standard tests of
statistical significance, whether or not you include Alaska would make a
difference to the inference.
The take home message is
that the personality data in the research study were matched up with dozens of
potential interesting variables, and in some cases small correlations were
observed. You'd have to look very
closely at the individual plots of the data to determine whether Alaska was
exaggerating or diminishing the final conclusions. It's obvious status as an outlier in these
internet data makes it a potential deal maker or deal breaker in the national
data.
The message as regards pre-employment testing is that small to
medium sized companies should examine data on pre-employment assessments and job
performance carefully. In a smallish
sample, say 50 recent hires, there could be influential outliers that make the
assessment look better or worse than it truly is.
Posted by Eric Loken on Tue, Sep 30, 2008 @ 07:53 PM
The Wall Street Journal last week ran an interesting article that summarizes a study that aggregates personality data on a state by state basis. The research is based on a Five Factor approach to studying
personality (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism/Stability, and Openness). Criteria's pre-employment testing solution features a personality inventory, the CPI, that is built on the same theoretical principles – and other employment personality tests that we offer also focus on a subset of these traits. Armed with over 600,000 internet surveys, the
researchers showed that on average, respondents from North Dakota were the most
agreeable in the country, and those in Alaska – by a huge margin – were the
least agreeable. Alaska also ranked near the bottom on the other four
personality dimensions too — but we'll have more on that in another blog post. But before we jump to any conclusions, let's stop to
consider why small states seem to pop up a lot near the top and bottom of these
lists.
A lot of it has to do with a simple principle of statistics
that as sample size increases, variability due to measurement error tends to
decrease. This is why it is safer to be
in a mutual fund than in a single stock. Although the upside of the single stock is greater, so too is the
downside, and risk management suggests you should invest more broadly to limit
the variance.
So how would this affect 600,000 surveys? Well, when those
surveys are divided across 50 states, very unequal sample sizes occur across
the board. Those agreeable folks from North
Dakota submitted 2,372 surveys, while Californians submitted 71,873. If you were doing sophisticated polling for
an election survey, either sample size should get you a good estimate of
people's preferences. But when you're
assessing something trickier to measure, like personality traits, and when the
samples are either self-selected participants who stumble across the website,
or students told to go to the website for course credit, there can be
considerable variation due to measurement error. This will tend to diminish as the size of the
sample increases.
A graph can save a thousand words. We've plotted the absolute value of the
scores on the agreeableness scale against the population size. You can see the clear descending
triangle. The chances that a state has
an extreme score on agreeableness (either high or low) goes down as the sample
size goes up.
We don't mean to deny that there are interesting patterns in
the personality data reported in the study. On the contrary, we're quite intrigued and expect to make a few more
blog posts on the topic. We're just
reminding people that when the 50 states are ranked from highest to lowest on
anything that has a lot of measurement error, states with smaller samples will
be overrepresented in the top and bottom parts of the list.
None of this should take away from the achievement of North
Dakota in being ranked most agreeable in the country. It's just that if there had been two million
surveys instead of two thousand it would have been even more impressive. Of
course two million surveys from North Dakota would have been an even more serious
problem…
Posted by Wayne Chuen on Fri, Sep 12, 2008 @ 06:02 PM
Criteria's employment test portfolio includes three personality tests: the Criteria Personality Inventory (CPI), the Customer Service Aptitude Profile (CSAP), and the Sales Achievement Predictor (SalesAP). The CSAP and SalesAP are actually the same test instrument and measure the same personality traits, but they produce different score reports and recommendations because customer service and sales positions require different personalities. For example, personality traits such as Assertiveness and Competitiveness are traditionally associated with sales roles, while traits like Cooperativeness and Patience are associated with customer service roles.
If you interview enough salespeople, invariably one of them will tell you that he can sell snow to an Eskimo. Personally, I doubt that I would be able to sell a fireplace to that same Eskimo. The point is that people generally have a good grasp of their personal strengths and weaknesses, and tend to apply for jobs in which they can thrive. Our data bears this out.
We examined the differences in average percentile scores for each of the 18 personality traits measured by the CSAP and SalesAP, and found that there was a distinct and measurable difference between the populations of customer service and sales applicants. For example, those that applied for customer service positions and took the CSAP scored in the 40.2 percentile for the "Sales Closing" trait on average, while those that applied for sales positions and took the SalesAP scored in the 56.9 percentile on average - a difference of 16.7 percentage points. For other traits typically associated with sales, there were strong differences favoring those that took the SalesAP as well: Sales Disposition (8.7 percentage points), Cold Calling (6.9), Competitiveness (8.1), Assertiveness (10.5), and Extraversion (5.5). Similarly, for traits typically associated with customer service, there were differences favoring those that took the CSAP: Cooperativeness (14.5 percentage points) and Patience (5.2).
Of the people that took the CSAP, 47.2% were Highly Recommended for customer service. However, we wanted to see what would have happened if those that took the CSAP actually took the SalesAP, and vice versa. If those applying for sales positions had actually applied for customer service positions, only 32.1% would have been Highly Recommended for customer service, a difference of 15.1 percentage points. Similarly, of the people that took the SalesAP, 17.4% were Highly Recommended for sales. If those applying for customer service positions had actually applied for sales positions, only 7.0% would have been Highly Recommended for sales, a difference of 10.4 percentage points.
Does this mean that all of your applicants will be well-suited for the jobs for which they're applying? Of course not. It does, however, demonstrate that consciously or subconsciously, people understand themselves and tend to apply for jobs at which they can feel comfortable and succeed.
Posted by Eric Loken on Wed, Aug 13, 2008 @ 07:11 PM
We found this article on introversion and extraversion to be interesting. (Another article on the same topic by the same author is found here.) We agree that certain personality dimensions tend to be valued with a one-way function, (e.g. the author points out there are even self-help courses aimed at "curing" introversion and helping people discover their inner extrovert). The article is a good reminder that there are merits at both ends of the introvert-extravert spectrum. The discussion focuses largely on the subjective experience of an individual in accepting (and being accepted for) their orientation when it comes to crowds and interactions. The pictures, however, remind us of people who have achieved great public distinction despite a preference for plenty of alone time.
From the perspective of employee testing, it's important to view employment personality tests in the context of the job demands. Criteria recommends that employers tailor the value they place on certain personality traits to the job characteristics. Extraversion might be a trait better suited to working in reception rather than accounting. There are no right or wrong answers
on personality tests, but in certain jobs there is evidence that people with certain traits tend to perform better than those who don't exhibit these traits. "More" is not necessarily always better when it comes to extraversion, and most employers are aware of this.
What we'd like to add to the discussion is that the construct of introvert/extravert is probably more of a continuum than two sides of a coin. Criteria has an extraversion scale as part of its personality inventory. We find that the scores of prospective employees tend to fall in a rather smooth bell curve, and not as clusters at each end of the continuum. So there's good evidence that it's an oversimplification to describe people using the "introvert" and "extravert" labels from the ends of the continuum (as the Myers-Briggs test does, among others).
Let's also not forget that people may act differently in different contexts. The list of famous introverts contained two outstanding comedians — Jerry Seinfeld and Johnny Carson. Although the definition of introvert is given as "someone who gets their energy from themselves," would anyone doubt that Seinfeld and Carson would prefer a large, packed auditorium to an empty coffee house? Some comedians might like to spend time alone; but all comedians perform best for a crowd.
Posted by Josh Millet on Wed, Jun 04, 2008 @ 02:02 PM
To finish off our discussion about personality tests, I wanted to discuss ways in which test developers are moving beyond the Big Five. The Big Five is sometimes too broad to predict work behaviors for specific jobs, where more fine-grained personality measures may be useful. For example, it has been shown that certain jobs such as sales positions are best performed by people with a set of personality characteristics that correspond to the work activities involved in sales jobs. Sales jobs often require cold-calling, initiating social interactions, prospecting, and building relationships. It won't be surprising to most people that qualities like assertiveness, extraversion, competitiveness, and self-confidence might be qualities that could help an individual perform well in such roles. For work in the field of customer service, on the other hand, qualities such as patience, cooperativeness, and personal diplomacy would be most important given the job activities of most customer service positions.
Because there is growing evidence of the predictive validity of personality measures for jobs such as sales and customer service, many test publishers have developed employment personality tests focused on these areas. For example, Criteria has a sales aptitude test and a customer service test that measure 18 different personality traits that predict performance in these jobs. These tests can have far greater utility than a Big-Five based test for a given position, because they provide much more targeted and fine-grained information based on the specific requirements of a given job. Because they have been customized to specific positions, the score reports for such tests are also typically easier to interpret than are general Big Five inventories. As personality research continues to advance, expect to see targeted, job-specific personality tests for a much wider range of positions in years ahead.
Posted by Josh Millet on Wed, May 14, 2008 @ 04:34 PM
A recent report summarized here suggests that personality testing is the fastest growing segment of the pre-employment testing market. The survey of HR professionals revealed that the percentage of respondents whose firms used personality tests has grown from 21% to 59% in the last five years alone. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of misconceptions about what personality tests are, and how they should be used. Since we get so many questions about how personality tests work, from both HR professionals and job candidates, I thought I'd try to explain some of the basics.
Employment personality tests are designed to measure personality traits that may be related to job performance. Most personality tests consist of a series of self-evaluative "prompts" and ask a test-taker to indicate the extent to which they agree or disagree with the statement. An example of a prompt might be "Meeting new people is enjoyable to me." There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, as the responses can be used to indicate behavioral tendencies that may or may not fit a particular job. For example, the prompt above might be one of many used to calculate an individual's "Extraversion" rating. A high score in Extraversion is not necessarily better than a low one, but an extraverted individual might be better suited for some jobs and less well-suited for others. A classic example is that highly extraverted individuals tend to perform better in sales jobs because not only are they more comfortable dealing with people, they are also better at initiating interactions. On the other hand, highly extraverted people might be less suited for jobs that require very little or even no social contact. They could potentially become bored or frustrated without social stimulation.
Professionally developed and validated employment personality tests attempt to measure constant, fixed "traits" thought to influence an individual's behavioral tendencies across a variety of contexts. The use of personality tests by companies during the hiring process has grown rapidly in recent years, with the dominant framework being the "Big Five." The Big Five are five dimensions of personality that seem to emerge consistently in empirical research: Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Openness (to Experience) and Stability.
How are the Big Five used to help companies with their hiring process? I'll get into more details on the applied use of personality tests in my next post.