Personality testing in the hiring process

Personality testing is big with many companies. Employers are using instruments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Big Five personality tests for things like assigning employees to teams. Some companies use them in hiring decisions, and that can be a problem.

The creators of the MBTI specifically state that the test shouldn't be used for selection. They specifically state that no personality type is better than another. The test is a self report measure of one's personal preferences for interacting with others. It doesn't claim to measure ability or motivation. Some researchers question its validity and reliability, and the evidence that it predicts on-the-job performance is mixed at best. But the tool is out there, and HR types are going to use what tools are available when they need help with selection.

Disclaimer: Even though I'm a Ph.D. psychologist, I didn't study personality theory in grad school. I haven't read the primary literature, only the HR and Org Behavior textbook versions of the literature, so I don't claim in-depth knowledge about personality testing. Apparently, though, there is evidence that the five-factor model (Big Five) predicts job performance for certain kinds of jobs. Researchers point to some studies that show that people with high scores on the extroversion and conscientiousness scales tend to perform well on the job. Those sorts of results are enough to encourage HR departments to employ the tests for selection.

What does this mean to you? If you're presented with a personality test during the hiring process you would be advised to answer in a way that maximizes your extroversion and conscientiousness scores. "I love to go to parties and talk to a lot of people. Agree or Disagree?" "I'm not satisfied until the job is done. Agree or Disagree?" The questions are nearly that obvious. What you want to do is get past the HR screening portion of the selection process and talk to the hiring manager about the real requirements for the job. At that point you can find out whether things like mixing with strangers at parties is a necessary function of the job.

Good luck, and let me know if you encounter personality testing during your interview.

Bad IVRs: You find them everywhere

I got a laugh out of this. Speech Technology magazine, which publishes articles about best of class call automation, admitted that their own IVR is pretty bad. So bad, in fact, that they're taking suggestions from readers about how to fix it.

Some of Speech Technology's readership is savvy enough to offer usable suggestions. Most businesses don't have the luxury of simply asking their customers for design advice, which is usually bad practice. Customers can tell you what works for them and what doesn't, but they can't do your design for you. Of course, someone at the magazine will need to sort out the conflicting advice they get.

Kudos to Speech Technology. The first step to solving a problem is to recognize that you have a problem. Sometimes that's the hardest thing for a company to do.

The usual suspects

I used to work for a large company that frequently announced new initiatives by sending out an an e-mail with a list of participants at the initiatives' kickoff meeting. The names on the participants' list rarely changed. I and some others in my work group referred to the names on the list as "The Usual Suspects" as in, "So, who was at the kickoff of The Next Great Thing Program?" "Oh, you know, The Usual Suspects." It was understood that the new initiative would follow the arc of previous initiatives. Everyone would advocate on behalf of their own business area, any new ideas would be compromised or eliminated from the final product, then everyone would declare victory and run off to the next big initiative. The script rarely changed no matter the real outcome of the project.

So when I was reading Jack and Suzy Welch's column on executive decision making in Business Week I almost split a gut when they used the phrase "the usual suspects" in the same way. Jack, of course, was an enormously successful CEO and leader, and it's impressive that he's able to see problems and solutions that seem almost to go unremarked on in many companies. At my old company, any suggestion from an employee that a kickoff include other than The Usual Suspects would have been rejected out of hand.

The Welches advocate for change agents in their column. Designers are by nature change agents. They're good to have around because they can see things from different perspectives. Execs and decision makers need to figure out how to identify and include them in new initiatives. And to stop relying so heavily on The Usual Suspects.

Caution: Design archeologist at work

I was leading a requirements meeting for a self service application recently when I heard the words that all experienced VUI designers have heard at some point in their careers: "This application is on our web site. Just look at that and use that for your design." I nodded, took a breath, tried not to digress too far into an explanation of how web design and VUI design differ, and agreed to look at the web application.

Trying to understand requirements from visual web designs is something I call design archeology. Any software interface is a collection of design decisions constrained by business requirements, user requirements, technical limitations, prior practice, existing standards, and often just the arbitrary personal preference of the designer. One field on a web page follows another because there's a business or technical reason, and sometimes there's no reason at all. Working backwards from design to requirements is a little like a physical archeologist trying to learn something about the way a culture functioned by excavating the site of an ancient city. The archeologist, digging through the dirt, makes inferences about artefacts based on the depth to which they are buried, the condition they are in, their location within a room, their proximity to one another, and so on. It's guesswork a lot of the time.

So it is with design archeology. I have the advantage over my counterparts because I can ask my clients questions about my hypotheses. Often, though, the creators of the web application have moved on and the answer is, "It's done that way because that's the way it was when I arrived." Often the original business rules were never captured anywhere but in the design itself.

Of course, it's important to parse out the requirements from the arbitrary aspects of the design because you need to know what you can safely change and what you need to preserve in your own design. And so it goes: dig dig dig, find, form hypothesis, check with client, dig some more. All in pursuit of a usable VUI design that will serve callers' needs.

Oddcast avatar

This text-to-speech demo by Oddcast is interesting in a couple of ways. Text to speech has improved quite a bit in just the last 3 or 4 years. This demo shows how easy it's become for non specialists to manipulate the sound of a TTS voice in different ways. I must say, some of the accents are less than convincing, but are fun to play with nevertheless. The avatar's responses to the movement of the pointer are quite natural and the timing for returning its gaze to you is well done.

Follow the SitePal link on the upper right side of the page and you'll discover that the company is promoting these avatars as a means of increasing conversion rates on e-commerce web sites. They even provide a high level description of a study. I'm skeptical. I'd really like to see some larger, more-conclusive studies before I'm convinced that an avatar can improve conversion rates. And I'd like an explanation as to why they work.

The demo raises questions about a hypothesis called the The Uncanny Valley phenomenon. To quote the wikipedia definition, the hypothesis states:

As a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy level.

The Max Headroom videos deliberately exploited the creepiness of a close-but-not-human avatar. The Uncanny Valley is an attractive hypothesis, but there's not a lot of real data to support it. On the other hand, I've seen badly-implemented, unironic Max Headroom-ish trying-too-hard-to-look-real avatars on the websites of major companies and wondered, "what are those people thinking? Have they tested that? That thing is TWITCHING and STARING at me!" The Uncanny Valley was at work. The Oddcast demo is really well done, in part because its not real enough to fall into the Uncanny Valley, but I'm curious about the real business benefit of these avatars.

Conversations 2007 conference

Just back from the Nuance Conversations 2007 conference in Boca Raton, Fla. I must say, as my first time at this conference it was quite different from the conferences I've attended in the past. There were several good presentations, some pretty modest presentations, and an overload of social events.

The keynote speech was by futurist James Canton. He gave a polished presentation that I thought was a little light on analysis. I heard a lot of buzzwords and some predictions I've been hearing for years, like the influence of artificial intelligence on our lives.

Many of the sessions were devoted to speech interfaces for mobile devices. The mobile keynote was very good. Scott Kliger, Jingle Networks, talked about free directory assistance, and how 800 FREE 411 has taken off. Most impressive was the amount of advertising money that will move from printed phone books-$14 billion-to somewhere else when the books are no longer printed. The free DA services will take a good portion of that. He noted that the most requested single number in the US is California Dept. of Motor Vehicles.

The big news was Nuance's purchase of Viecore. It was announced at one of the keynote talks. That generated some buzz.

One of the final sessions made reference to the keynote speaker, with a presentation on "Top 10 reasons you know your futurist missed the mark." Of the couple I remember, "Refers to 'accessing the Internets,' 'predicts that the Cleveland Indians will win the ALCS.'" I've never heard a conference speaker crack on the keynote speaker before.

IVRs aren't your company's biggest problem

It's easy to blame IVRs for a lot of your company's customer service problems. Because it's true-sometimes the IVR just isn't very well designed. A lot of times, though, it helps to look past the IVR into business practices.

Here's an opinion piece that takes issue with a Gethuman recommendation to send callers to a live CSR if one is available. The author of the article points out correctly that there's value to companies in identifying high value customers, and giving them preferred service. However, you can still prioritize customers without violating the Gethuman principle he identifies.

I have other problems with the Gethuman principle, and with the author's unstated assumption in the article. Both assume that IVR contacts are necessarily bad, or at least worse than a interaction with a human. For simple interactions that involve call transfers, account balances, password resets and so on, there's no reason why the IVR interaction should be less satisfying than one with a CSR. Better, in fact, if you add a little time in queue to reach a CSR. The fact that many IVRs give such poor service even for simple requests is due to failures of design and implementation, not to a limitation of the technology itself. You can serve simple requests from high value customers using IVR just as well as with CSRs if your IVR is well done.

The author identifies IVR as the culprit for poor customer service. In many cases, that's true, the IVR is poorly designed. The other, harder problem is that many companies are bad at identifying high value customers, and in defining what it means to provide high level service. What good does it do to get a caller to a CSR who mumbles, can't find information, doesn't recognize opportunities to provide additional service, doesn't answer the unasked question, and so on? Those problems aren't solved with even the best IVR.

The upshot of this is that IVR designers need to be able to see the big picture, and understand what problems the business is trying to solve. If they can't do that, they'll wind up spending a lot of time designing IVRs that don't address real issues.