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By Deborah Keary
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Deborah Keary is the Director of the Information Center at The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Founded in 1948, SHRM currently represents more than 165,000 individual members in more than 120 countries. The Society is committed to advancing the human resource profession to ensure that HR is an essential and effective partner in developing and executing organizational strategy.
Q. I need to hire employees who will be handling money. Do you think giving personality tests would be useful?
A. Formal personality tests are used to see if a candidate will be a good overall fit within the company or the job, and they test for many traits. If you simply want to gauge an applicant's honesty or integrity, your best bet may be an honesty test; it's not considered to be a personality test, because it only looks at one characteristic, but you probably don't need anything more extensive. These tests are based on the premise that past behavior is an indicator of future behavior. So, they ask about applicants' previous actions and beliefs to predict how they will act in the workplace. Other tests may also be appropriate, such as skills-oriented tests for knowledge of accounting procedures or simple mathematics; of course, they also aren't personality tests.
If you decide to go this route, you'll have to take a few steps. First, be careful to establish that the tests are reliable, valid and non-discriminatory. And make sure to use them consistently for all candidates for a specific position to avoid any appearance of discrimination. Also, an experienced test administrator should give tests to applicants and the results should be held in strict confidence.
Ultimately, however, any test needs to be only one factor in your decision. Structured interviewing, previous job experience, the statements of references and possibly a credit check should all be part of the hiring process.
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