Job Hunt as Head Trip?

Jennifer Pham had been warned that she would have to undergo a behavioral interview if she wanted to get a job with Accenture, the giant management and technology consulting firm. Still, the 26-year-old MBA candidate found the 45-minute session much more demanding than she anticipated.

“It’s pretty intense,” said Pham, who is due to graduate from the University of Cincinnati next month. “You can pretty much fake one or two answers, but the third time they come back to it you pretty much can’t. You’re pulling from real life, and you’re nervous. [The interviewer] asked how I would prepare for something important. He came back to that again and again to make sure what I said was true. The whole time they are writing constantly. I think part of this is seeing how well you can think on your feet.”

Many more job applicants--and even some employees who are already on the job--can look forward to similar grilling now that the economy has slowed.

The tight labor market of the long-running economic boom had placed a pretty large dent in the number of companies willing to risk alienating good prospects by sending them through a battery of behavioral or psychological tests. But some experts say the trend has reversed.

In fact, a host of online companies have sprung up in recent years offering their own versions of the perfect “best fit” screening tests for job applicants.

That worries workplace rights advocates and leaves many of those taking the tests--especially those already on the job--uncomfortable at best.

“A lot of companies have suddenly been created, and there is some dishonesty on the part of the testing industry,” said Lewis Maltby, founder of the pro-labor National Workrights Institute. “Everybody knows that these tests should not be the litmus test for hiring or not hiring a person. Most of the reputable companies say that you shouldn’t make their test the sole determining factor, but others do.

“The best indicator of future job performance is past job performance,” Maltby said. “That tells an employer 100 times more than any psychological test.”

In addition, some tests can create legal nightmares for employers by asking questions that have been deemed inappropriate by various state and federal laws.

The companies that administer the tests say they are valuable in the hiring process.

“Behavioral-based interviewing has been an integral part of our recruiting process for about 10 years, said Bill Ziegler, director of global recruiting for Chicago-based Accenture, which was formerly known as Andersen Consulting. “We believe very strongly that if you can understand how someone has behaved in the past, it can provide a very good indication of how they will behave in the future. We want to make sure, given the investment, that we are selecting the right people. This is being used by an increasing number of employers.”

San Diego-based Gateway Computers uses an outside testing firm to profile high-level job candidates to figure out where they might fit best in the company.

“It’s not used to determine eligibility but rather the opportunities for growth of the potential employee,” spokesman Tyson Heyn said.

Most companies that do testing say it is only one part of the hiring process.

“What kind of a screening process do you want?” asked Tom Burke, an attorney with the Los Angeles-based law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. Burke advises companies that want to begin using behavioral and psychological tests, and works with companies whose tests have been legally challenged.

“You have to come back to basic methods. Interviews. Checking out past performance. Asking the applicant to sign a waiver for criminal background and financial checks,” Burke said. “All of that is the work of screening. If you want a shortcut, I personally don’t think there is a test that will shortcut all of that. I don’t have that much faith in these tests. I’m not convinced they are great predictors.”

Eric Greenberg, director of management studies for the American Management Assn., agreed, to a point.

Some Employees Uneasy About Exam Questions

“All of these tests are really less important in the hiring process than the interview, the resume and the record of accomplishments in past employment,” Greenberg said. “Much more important is the face-to-face look and the feel of the individual candidate. The one-on-one interview is still the most highly regarded instrument,” Greenberg said.

Even if behavioral or psychological tests are useful as part of the hiring process, those same tests can come as quite a shock to people already on the job.

As someone looking to get hired, MBA candidate Pham says she wasn’t bothered by her behavior interview at Accenture.

Her boyfriend, Don Hott, however, already was working as a Web site administrator in Cincinnati when his boss thought that their work group ought to take a standard psychological profile survey. He wasn’t pleased.

“There were questions like, ‘Do you feel comfortable speaking to people you don’t know at a party?’ ” Hott said. “Self-motivation-type questions. Introvert or extrovert. Analytical or emotional. I thought it was a little invasive. I don’t feel you can get a very accurate picture of an employee through this kind of testing. I’ve worked for these people. I trusted them.”

Confusion About Tests Is Common Complaint

Don Tolbert, 41, of Denver was working at a large call center that answers customer support questions for other companies when he was asked to take a test. He remembers one question was about how he would respond if his boss had given him a deadline that he was just barely going to be able to meet and a co-worker came to him asking for emergency help.

“I don’t have a clue” why the tests were given, Tolbert said. “We didn’t know who read [the results]. We didn’t know what it was for. We didn’t know who would be discussing it. We didn’t know if or how our pay would be affected. It raised the stress level quite a bit.”

That kind of confusion is one of the most common complaints of workers who have been tested.

Experts warn that workers usually will remain clueless about testing.

Don’t expect your employer to tell you what they were looking for, they said. And don’t expect to ever learn whether the test results were considered important or were just left to gather dust in some human resource administrator’s computer files.

Company administrators say they test employees for a number of reasons, including: to see whether they really know the people who work for them, as a kind of validation of their own managerial judgment; and to see whether the work group complements one another’s strengths and weaknesses.

Yet just picking the right test can be difficult. And even after a firm has chosen the right kind of screening program, it still must be studied in practice to see whether it has helped hire the right workers and has improved retention.

“The main question is whether the test measures what it purports to measure,” said Hodge Golson, one of the founders of a Georgia-based company called ETest and president of Management Psychology Group. “There is always a need to validate the test in your own company in terms of retention and performance. . . . You need to make sure it works in your own backyard.”

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Net Results

One of the online testing companies is ETest. One of the psychological tests it sells is available for a “test drive” online. This test utilizes a long list of adjectives and asks the prospective employee how well that adjective describes him or her, from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

Certain terms used, such as “by-the-book,” will draw responses based on the person’s perceptions. For example, the job applicant might view the term as a plus and strongly agree, thinking that it means a thorough and cautious person who won’t panic. Other applicants may view it differently, thinking it means a person who operates by rote and lacks creativity and spontaneity.

The test even uses a few nonsense words, such as “incentious,” just to make certain that the test taker is paying attention and isn’t trying to fudge his answers. The company says there are no right or wrong answers.

Here are a few of the adjectives used in the ETest and how they might be interpreted by the test taker:

* Accepting: Tolerant in getting along with others.

* Administrative: Detail-oriented, putting the process together.

* Advance planner: People who look ahead for solutions down the road.

* Adventurous: Outgoing; might enjoy cold-calling, approaching strangers.

Sources: MPG, Management Consulting Group, ETest