McDonald's Making Job Applicants Take Weird AI Personality Tests

[senkora]

> Paradox's "Traitify" product, which uses the strange slides to lump applicants into "Big Five" or "OCEAN" personality groups, rating them on how open, conscientious, extraverted, agreeable, and neurotic they are.

For the record, the correct answer is always to be low on neuroticism and high on everything else. The role doesn’t matter; that is always the “ideal” personality and any deviation is a defect that will only be tolerated if they are having trouble filling the role.

[mordechai9000]

Many years ago, barely out of high school, I took a test for a temporary warehouse stock picking job. The test was primarily concerned with the applicants' attitude to authority and violence. Oh, and theft, of course. Many questions were repetitive, and used slight variation in wording or reversed meaning to ask the same things over and over again.

So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you agree with these statements? Sometimes it is ok to hit people. I feel like hitting my boss sometimes. Some people deserve to be punched. Sometimes is is necessary to use violence to solve a problem. Taking pens from work isn't really stealing. Etc.

I suppose they must've managed to screen out at least some of the people who are not very smart and prone to violence and theft.

[15155]

> low on neuroticism

Ultra-low neuroticism can mean "not detail-oriented."

[wodenokoto]

In my experience consistency in your answers is the most important trait.

[mr_toad]

Putting a bunch of open agreeable extraverted teenagers together in close quarters sounds like an HR nightmare.

[ChrisArchitect]

Just a rewrite of walled 404 piece:

Service Jobs Now Require Bizarre Personality Test From AI Company

https://www.404media.co/low-paying-jobs-require-bizarre-pers...

[camgunz]

Yeah there's a few of these rewrites on Futurism but this is the most blatant one so far (you can see if you search '"404 media"'). Eek.

[ChrisArchitect]

Related recently:

I applied for a software role at FedEx and was asked to take a personality test

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346870

[jhbadger]

Yes, but that's more expected (if still not really justified). White collar jobs often have personality tests as a "filter" -- even decades ago I remember taking the now generally mocked Myers Briggs test at interviews. Fast food jobs on the other hand are traditionally known for minimal screening and it is odd that McDonald's would start doing it now when there is already a labor shortage for low paying jobs.

[bjconlan]

I read this as "Weird Al personality tests" and thought its a great idea. More places should be employing based on their Weird Al index, would finally improve the "fun place to work" aspects

[Terr_]

I put work-related parody Daft Punk lyrics onto a conference room whiteboard last week, so this metric intrigues me greatly.

[sowerssix]

Came here to say exactly this. Enjoy your upvote, my dude.

[olliej]

Someone really needs to test how these “personality tests” are actually “testing” people. This feels very much like “let’s launder bias by using ‘algorithms’ that do the discrimination because they’re trained on existing bias”

[Double_Org]

There is a quasi-legal standard for creating and validating pre-employment assessment (https://www.apa.org/ed/accreditation/personnel-selection-pro...) but there isn't a lot of regulation and there are plenty of sketchy startups happy to sell low quality assessments to middle-managers at companies with poorly run HR departments.

[doubloon]

Its simple. They are testing to see if you can do a web search for the expected answers to weird jargon questions from the upper class, which is actually a great prep for a lot of jobs… finding the magic nonsense words to say to people of higher rank is a very important skill. So is disconnecting your logical brain while doing so. A lot of jobs are about acting a role in addition to providing a service or product.

[mediumsmart]

The real lifelong personality test is having worked there. If you come back as a customer fail does not begin to describe it.

[givemeethekeys]

Ah, the blue people test. There's a company thats selling these personality tests to large companies.

Any job that requires that you be an obedient little robot will require that you take such a personality test.

[lp0_on_fire]

It's bad enough many companies want to run invasive background checks (up to and including pulling your credit) for milquetoast low-paying-entry-level jobs now they want people to take some bastardized version of Myers–Briggs which itself is pseudoscience?

I sorta understand a company wanting to do that for some C-level or upper management position, or for a finance person responsible for the books...but for a burger flipper???

[maayank]

Do you know the name of the company/other references about this test?

[listenallyall]

"Weird AI personality tests" seems scary, but it's likely many big-corporate workers had to suffer through top management's Myers-Briggs phase, (which is just as weird and just as non-scientific) forcing everyone not just to take the test but to share the results with colleagues. I'd probably also put "Kanban" as another consultant-led pseudoscience money grab that everyone detests.

[bashtoni]

I can't be the only one who read this headline and was disappointed that in fact they are not letting Weird Al write their interview questions.

[croes]

Is that some clever way of head line click bait?

[MrFots]

You are not. My sans serif font also betrayed me.