How can you cheat at psychological tests?

[P***@gmail.com]

I've found something curious. There was a company called Hagberg
Consulting that made its money from providing psychological tests to
companies. In particular they provided pre-employment testing. In the
articles about them one famous example of a client is, or was, quoted
in most of the articles about them.

Hagberg were responsible for the pre-employment tests that landed Carly
Fiorina the job at Hewlett-Packard.

Hagberg have now been bought out by Accucenter and their web-site makes
no mention at all about this achievement.

I'd be really curious to learn the conclusions that Hagberg Consulting
came, or Dr Hagberg himself, a Ph.D in psychology. Her's a good article
on Carly herself:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=2546914&page=1

How was it that Hagberg consulting got it so badly wrong as to land HP
with one of the most disasterous CEOs ever?

- Is it easy to cheat at the tests?
- Might there have been hidden information in the tests, revealing her
as unsuitable, that Hagberg consulting missed?
- Was it that Hagberg was taking the obvious traits that led to the
utter collapse of the HP share price over her entire period and
inflicted the disasterous Compaq fiasco as positive traits? In other
words, did Hagberg misunderstand completely the requirements for the
job?

Or is it just that pre-employment tests are actually useless?

I know that this is just one case, but it is a very evident failure and
one that the firm responsible boasted about for several years. It would
be fascinating to learn the reasons behind this.

[John -- LifeHandle]

Hi Peter

I worked for Ericsson some time ago, and we used to get SHL to do
psychometric testing of prospective employees.

Overtime it was very apparent that there was a very good correlation
between good test scores and high professional competence.

The SHL scores were more positively indicated with higher professional
competence than high achievement in fully accredited and relevant
university courses.

John
http://www.lifehandle.com

[Peter H.M.Brooks]

Post by John -- LifeHandle
Hi Peter
I worked for Ericsson some time ago, and we used to get SHL to do
psychometric testing of prospective employees.
Overtime it was very apparent that there was a very good correlation
between good test scores and high professional competence.
The SHL scores were more positively indicated with higher professional
competence than high achievement in fully accredited and relevant
university courses.

That's interesting. How did you establish this? Did you carry out a
double-blind test?

I'm also interested in what areas showed 'high professional competence'
- I can see technical areas working, or first level management. The
Carly Fiorina case shows that they sometimes fail spectacularly in
senior management selection. Do you know of any work that's been done to
test the success with senior management?

[John -- LifeHandle]

We didn't carry out any clinical studies.

It just became apparent that those people who earned promotion through
demonstrating superior ability, also happened to score high on the SHL
tests.

I can't imagine there was an exclusive one to one correlation. However
as an initial evaluation tool, we fould the SHL tests to be good
predictors.

The tests were only for technical people and were not used on managers.

John
http://www.lifehandle.com

[P***@gmail.com]

Post by John -- LifeHandle
We didn't carry out any clinical studies.
It just became apparent that those people who earned promotion through
demonstrating superior ability, also happened to score high on the SHL
tests.
I can't imagine there was an exclusive one to one correlation. However
as an initial evaluation tool, we fould the SHL tests to be good
predictors.
The tests were only for technical people and were not used on managers.

That makes sense. I think that it must be difficult to produce good
tests for senior managers, which is both why the company boasted about
having placed Fiorina through their tests and why it was such a
spectacular disaster.