Personality Tests In Employee Selection

During hiring process, employers use a wide variety of tests to choose the best candidate for their company. These tests are used to eliminate candidates that are not fit for the company. The personality test, is one of many that is being used in many organizations as a means of making a hiring decision. It has been studied that personality traits predict success in job performance. Having the ability to judge the candidate before hiring can ultimately forecast how fit the employee is for the company. Personality tests uses conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotionally stable as predictors of job performance. Companies want to know what type of personality traits you have before hiring, for the reason that bad hiring

A research investigates perceived selection ratio may affect faking personality test. The higher the selection ratio, being closer to 1, the less selective and the lower the ratio, being closer to 0, the more selective the hiring decision. One can predict that the lower the selection ratio the more opportunity for the candidate to fake the personality test. The study consisted of 150 undergraduate participants split into two groups, half of the participants were given a test with obvious items and other half given more subtle items. Each group of participants were randomly selected in three groups of 25; low, moderate, and high selection ratio. In this study done by Chet Robie, his “Results showed no statistically significant mean differences between personality scale scores across levels of perceived selection ratios for each personality inventory” (Robie,2006, pg.1233). This study shows, overall score on obvious items in test and selection ratio category and overall score on subtle items in test and selection ratio category; both are not less than 0.05 thus not significant. Participants didn’t care if they have a higher chance of getting hired or lower chance, in either situation participants didn’t take the opportunity to fake the personality test. Therefore, even if selection ratio is low, meaning a likelihood of possibly one candidate being chosen, and high opportunity to fake mean score differences show no statistically