The Baring of a Job Applicant s Soul

The Baring of a Job Applicant's Soul

In addition to more traditional background information, employers remain enthusiastic about tests that purport to reveal something about a job applicant's personality and temperament. Ever since Sigmund Freud developed his theory of the subconscious mind and the role that it plays in our behavior, we've been fascinated by the idea that future behavior can be predicted based on the responses that people give to various test questions. While the validity of that idea is questionable, it has not stopped a wide range of organizations, from the military to private employers, from using tests in an effort to find the perfect employee.

According to the 2001 American Management Association employment survey, 26 percent of responding employers said that they used psychological testing for their job candidates. That figure was actually down four percentage points from the preceding year, which labor specialists attributed to a tight labor market.

The phrase "psychological testing" actually covers a fair amount of territory. The popular perception is that it's designed to make sure that you don't have any major mental illness that will threaten yourself, your fellow workers, or the business's customers. But the phrase also applies to tests aimed at gauging your cognitive ability, your ethical values, and your personality.

Pyschological Exams

The U.S. military, not surprisingly, was among the first major organizations in our country to make extensive use of psychological testing. During World War I, the military created the Psychological Testing Corps to develop and implement psychological tests that could be used to assign soldiers to specific jobs.

After the war, the military's testing program came under heavy fire because of its pronounced racism. Studies revealed that eastern and southern Europeans consistently scored lower than northern Europeans, and African Americans consistently scored lower than Caucasians. These studies underscored one of the fundamental problems with psychological testing of any sort: The challenge of creating a test that fairly takes into account often profound cultural differences.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychological testing fell further out of favor due to federal restrictions on asking prospective employees about certain forbidden subjects, including age, race, gender, or sexual orientation. There has been limited action in this area among the states: Only New York has a relevant statute, one that prohibits employers from requiring that job applicants or employees take psychological stress evaluator tests.

When lie detector tests were essentially banned as a hiring tool in 1988, psychological testing made a brief comeback, but it still suffers from a stigma of being associated with mental illness. Employers generally tell applicants that they are being asked to take a personality or aptitude test instead of a psychological exam.

In addition, psychological exams are governed by the same constraints that apply to preemployment medical exams. An employer can require you to take a psychological exam, but only if all other applicants for the same type of job are required to do so. The report that comes out of the exam is supposed to be limited to your psychological fitness for the job, and not include information about any nonwork-related psychological problems that you may have. A consistent problem, of course, is that when the employer is paying for the cost of the exam, there is a serious potential conflict of interest for the tester when the employer requests additional information.