Really, what laws are those then?

Employment law generally covers the principle of fair and transparent hiring; you can’t make decisions that discriminate against anything other than ability to do the job. For example, you can’t say you hired person A over person B ‘because their face fitted better’; you have to be able to substantiate that with objective data that shows that person A was better able to do the job than person B.

Cultural fit is a key component of that decision for sure, but it’s a risky criteria on its own as it could easily be that ‘culture’ is just a cover for race, gender, ethnicity etc, none of which are ever factors in job performance.

And that’s the key – you have to substantiate your hiring decision based on likely job performance. If you’re going to use a tool to help inform that assessment, then that tool has to be able to give you some degree of insight into likely job performance (the degree of accuracy will be low for various reasons). That correlation between the data generated and it’s description of some unknown future performance is called ‘predictive validity’. Any tool with little to no predictive validity, in relation to job performance, can’t be used to substantiate a hiring decision because the data is false. You’ll likely end up hiring someone like yourself and in the process indirectly discriminate against candidates that aren’t like you. While not a foregone conclusion, you’re more likely than not to end up discriminating against candidates from other diverse backgrounds (race, gender, ethnicity etc).

Note, I am not saying that the results of MBTI correlate with those characteristics; I’m pretty sure they don’t. But if you’re hiring strategy is based on hiring in your own self likeness, then you definitely increase the chances of that happening.

Plenty of companies use them for hiring decisions, been through it myself several times with job interviews.

There are any number of tools that have high (relatively speaking) predictive validity that companies routinely use to increase their hiring accuracy.

I’d love to see anyone try and design a proper double blind trial for accuracy of any of these tests.

Lordy where do you want to start; fancy doing a literature search and review for a thesis? Proper Psychology, as distinct from the popular, bottom feeding variety taught in too many so called academic institutions, is based very thoroughly on robust statistical analysis and there are many books written on the subject.

As applied in business, Organisational/Industrial Psychology has an incredibly robust business model behind it based on incremental improvements in your hiring decisions. Even though the very best, most robust approaches to assessment only ever get you to a correlation co-effecient of about 0.7 (and that’s on a good day with a tail wind, your average process will get to about 0.4) if you think about it, you only need to improve your decisions and the subsequent outcomes but a little bit to make a big improvement in organisational performance.

If you have a company of 50,000 people and an attrition rate of 7% (which would be a bit below average for an anglo saxon economy business) and you’re average cost to hire is say £10,000 (this is total cost including incurred costs and opportunity costs), then the cost to the business is £35,000,000 (note that this is not a cash cost, that would be more like £8,750,000).

If you have no process for robust measurement and 30% of your hiring decisions go wrong within 12 months, then that’s 1500 people at a cost of £15m to the business. If you were able to reduce that to say 15%, which would be realistic, you’ll save £7.5m. The degree of predictive validity doesn’t need to be very high in order to achieve that so the business case ends up being pretty solid.

I answered all of the questions honestly and it came up that I am an introspective, dreaming artist! Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Apart from deducing that I dislike social functions (which is an understatement – I’d rather pull my fingernails off than go to a works “do”) I didn’t recognise any of my supposed “traits “.
Clearly I’m a very complex character…

Having spent the last 20 years in Psychology (studying, academia, teaching, research, selection/recruitment, etc.) I obviously don’t think its bollocks. I do think a lot of the pop-psychology & instruments like the MBI give it a bad name.

The Myer-Brigg’s indicator is based on Jung’s 1920s theories, which typecasts subjects into a system of 16 categories. The questionnaire, and hence conclusions drawn from it, can be criticised on the basis that it is ipsative, it places people into discreet types and its psychoanalytic roots render it unsuitable for providing quantitative data that can be related to job performance or general personality rating.

When all you’ve got’s a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

unknown – Member
Don’t make the mistake of confusing reliability with validity. A broken compass could consistently point north when I’m facing east, it’s reliable but not valid.

As for accuracy… the test asks you what you’re like, you tell it what you’re like ( based on meaningless binaries), then it tells you what you’re like (based on meaningless binaries). Throw in a bit of confirmation bias and of course it seems accurate. It’s still total guff though

Is it not useful as a tool for structured reflection then? Asking someone questions and reflecting back their answers to them can be very helpful in a counselling situation.

My wife is very nearly a chartered Occ. Psychologist and here’s a surprise for you, she is trained in and uses Myers Briggs (amongst lots of other things).

It’s a tool and has limitations. Properly applied it can be useful, even if it just gets a workforce to come to the realisation that their colleagues have different preferences for how they approach things. Your ‘preferences’ are supposed to fed back to you by someone who knows what they’re doing. Just having your result passed back to you by a computer isn’t how it’s supposed to work…..but very often that’s how it’s applied!

Unfortunately it’s widely misused, e.g. as a selection tool. It gives no indication of ability in a role, how could it?

Yep Mr Woppit, confirmation bias is an important psychological concept that must be controlled for!

Is it not useful as a tool for structured reflection then?

In my professional experience, getting someone to successfully reflect on their behaviour, approach to work, style etc, is about as good an outcome as you can ever hope for. You should hope for more of course, but just getting to here is a huge step for a lot of people and not an easy one to achieve. Any tool that achieves that has value in my view.

ENFP as always (see confirmation bias comments above!).

The only value I’ve taken from it is how to better manage my boss – he’s your classic successful corporate type: ISTJ.

In my professional experience, getting someone to successfully reflect on their behaviour, approach to work, style etc, is about as good an outcome as you can ever hope for. You should hope for more of course, but just getting to here is a huge step for a lot of people and not an easy one to achieve. Any tool that achieves that has value in my view.

I agree

The only value I’ve taken from it is how to better manage my boss – he’s your classic successful corporate type: ISTJ.

The successful corporate type is actually ENTJ, also known as ‘the field marshal’.

The idea very premise that we have one behaviour type and demonstrate it at all times is daft, people are way smarter with much greater complexity than a simple default position

Thanks for summing up what I was thinking.

CONSUL (ESFJ-T) i.e. a wet lettuce 😉

ISTP on this one, same as when previously done in full.

No surprises there.