Are Personality Assessments the Right Answer to Your Staffing Search?

In a recent interview on WGN, SVP and Senior HR Consultant Bret McKitrick shared his perspectives on the topic of employee testing and explored the best practices and legal ramifications around their use.

For years, employers have administered personality assessments, or integrity tests as they’re sometimes called, when screening applicants and new hires. Their aim is to point out traits, characteristics or even temperaments that can predict the employee’s fit in a company culture, or their potential for success.

Today’s workplace testing

Today’s tests are incorporating new technology and analysis techniques, such as applying artificial intelligence and algorithms to dive deeper and pick out qualities like accountability, dependability, integrity, and even certain behavioral traits.

The question is, where can a test for useful qualities in an employee turn into a full-fledged psychological evaluation? And what are the problems that arise from this?

To begin with, McKitrick points out that tests like these can give rise to potential discrimination issues and conflicts with existing employment laws. For example, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects against discrimination due to race, religion, ethnicity and other factors. The Age Discrimination and Employment Act can come into play as well.

Preventing discrimination based on disabilities

However, it’s the ADA (the Americans with Disabilities Act) that can really impact the use of these tests. Because some of these tests can look more like a psychological or medical evaluation, they may conflict with the ADA’s prohibition against employers conducting pre-hire medical examinations. Even administering these tests post-offer, which is allowed, could uncover certain disabilities, but the employer wouldn’t be able to use this information against that individual.

In some cases, employers might want to administer polygraph tests to determine a prospective hire’s integrity—their propensity to lie, for example. However, the Employee Polygraph Protection Act, a federal law enacted in 1988, largely prohibits employees being made take a lie detector test unless under certain circumstances. Some states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, have their own legal restrictions on polygraph use as well.

Employee rights

What can an employee do? For one, if they’re compelled to take a test, they should talk to the employer about how they will use the results. Because these tests can focus on specific, static traits, they might not consider every situation, or show how an employee deals with changes in the work environment. These results might even pigeonhole employees into certain personality types, which could impact their entire career.

Because of advances in technology and a booming job market, hiring can be a minefield of risks. In reality, it’s still incredibly difficult to hire the “right person” and pre-hire tests are far from a perfect science. According to McKitrick, “You can throw all the personality tests out there, you can look at all the LinkedIn pages, you can try to find references, but the reality is, it’s a crap shoot. And I think employers need to understand that there’s no one determining factor that’s going to be the panacea or the easy button.”