Why I Stopped Using Psychometric Tests

What the personality assessments missed about the people I hired

Personality tests measure how a candidate answers a personality test; they do not predict whether someone will show up Monday, finish what they start, or tell you the truth when something breaks.

Psychometric instruments — MBTI-style type indicators, DISC-style work-style inventories, Big Five personality questionnaires, custom HR-tech assessments — sell SME founders a feeling of rigour they did not previously have. The feeling is real. The rigour is not. What these instruments measure is the candidate's answers on the day of the test, filtered through self-presentation, language fluency, and whatever the candidate thinks the boss wants to hear. What they do not measure is whether the person finishes a job, comes back on time after lunch, owns a mistake, or calls the vendor when the part is wrong. After several years of treating assessment PDFs as a tiebreaker and watching the tiebreaker lose to reality every quarter, the operator stopped buying them. The replacement is not a better test. The replacement is paid work observed under conditions that resemble the actual job, recorded in writing, scored against the specific deliverable, and weighted above any self-report instrument including the interview itself. This book is the operator's confession of what the assessments missed, the false confidence they bought him, and the cheaper unglamorous practices that quietly did better.

Audiences:

• Salim, founder of a 28-person services firm — Bought a subscription to a work-style assessment after a string of bad hires, treats the report as a tiebreaker, still ends up with the same turnover problem twelve months later.
• Rina, HR lead at an Indonesian SME hiring blue-collar and admin staff — Boss mandates DISC or MBTI-style screening because a consultant sold it as a 'culture fit' filter; she runs the tests, files the PDFs, and watches them get ignored when the boss hires his cousin's friend anyway.
• Joko, small-shop operator with 6 staff in a non-Indonesian emerging market — Cannot afford a subscription assessment, feels he is hiring blind, copies a free Big-Five quiz off the internet and asks candidates to fill it in by hand because that is what real companies do.

Note: written from Indonesian operator context. Frameworks apply broadly to other emerging-market and SME settings.