How flunking a personality test can cost you your dream job

Just ask Nick Malik, who’s been given online personality assessments by three prospective employers in recent months while applying, unsuccessfully so far, for senior-level engineering roles.

“I’ve gotten some really weird questions," he says. “I understand the desire to know a little bit about your applicants, but I don’t think running their answers by a bot is very effective."

Malik isn’t sure whether his test results, age (he’s 59), or something else is holding him back. But his experience reflects companies’ fixation on “fit"—the biggest buzzword in hiring.

Nick Malik is looking for a senior engineering job and has been given personality tests by three prospective employers.

To gauge this nebulous quality, employers are reaching for personality assessments ranging from questionnaires developed by psychologists to ancient methods of divining character traits, such as astrology and handwriting analysis.

Many bosses place a higher premium on teams that jell as technology automates more tasks and applicant pools teem with qualified candidates. Skill matters, of course, but companies can be pickier now than when they were desperate for talent a few years ago.

Managers consistently tell me that when hires don’t work out, it’s usually because they turn out to be incompatible, not incapable. Impressions of someone can be off-base or biased—even more so when a lot of interviews are held on Zoom—so businesses are hungry for something better than gut instincts.

Data on the share of employers administering personality tests is hard to come by, but Myers-Briggs, perhaps the best-known maker of these assessments, says usage is on the rise. It’s a trend that triggers mixed feelings in John Hackston, the company’s director of thought leadership.

“You have to be a little bit careful that you’re not just cloning the people already on your team," he says.

Personality assessments can be insightful when carefully designed to detect the attributes that predict high performance in specific roles, says Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who advises the candidate-screening company BrightHire. But some tests amount to snake oil, he says, because they can be gamed or reduce complex people to oversimplified labels like introvert or extrovert.

“Every manager, myself included, has kicked himself, thinking: ‘I really shouldn’t have hired that person. What did I miss?’" Grant says. “It seems like anything you could do to get more information and avoid falling into that trap would be useful, but not all personality tests are reliable and valid."

Talent in the stars

Managers are also probing the personalities of those already in their charge in hopes of improving team dynamics. Some strategies are a bit eccentric.

A Google contractor recently came to Cinzia Biondi with a problem: Her team of five people had all the right technical skills but wasn’t clicking. Instead of administering a lengthy questionnaire, Biondi used a much older kind of personality test.

“I started with numerology," using the team members’ names and birth dates to try to ascertain their true natures and fortunes, Biondi says. “I told her a certain person is not really focused on work right now because he’s in a specific life cycle, and you will do better placing him on another kind of task."

Biondi, a former biomedical engineer, bills herself as a business astrologer. Advising managers on personnel moves and the timing of product launches was a side hustle until last year. The resurgence of astrology in popular culture enabled her to become a full-time consultant.

The use of astrology in hiring and team building is far from mainstream—but more common than many job seekers realize, she says. Bosses who consult with her come up with alternative explanations for their decisions, instead of telling people they missed out on promotions because they’re Libras or Scorpios.

Companies hire graphologist Sheila Lowe to analyze job candidates’ handwriting for clues about their personalities.

Sheila Lowe says there can be a similar taboo attached to her work as a graphologist. The president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation often serves as an expert witness in court cases, and she consults with companies looking for clues about prospective hires’ personalities in their handwriting.

For example, a signature that looks markedly different from someone’s regular penmanship suggests a person’s private life and outward persona don’t match, she says. Oversize capital letters indicate conceit.

But telling people their handwriting doomed their candidacies doesn’t go over well, so her clients tend to give applicants different reasons.

“One time an employer that sends me writing samples for sales positions was very transparent and told someone, ‘The handwriting analyst says that you tend to blow up,’" Lowe says. “The candidate blew up at that."

Wired for success

You can’t change your birthday, and you probably don’t even know what a graphologist is looking for. (I certainly didn’t when I was asked to submit a cursive writing sample to a consulting firm where I once received a job offer.)

But surely you can figure out the “correct" answers on a personality questionnaire, right?

Don’t be so certain, says Ryan Stewart, product manager at Affintus, a maker of personality assessments.

“Most salespeople think, ‘I’ve got to be an extrovert,’ but it’s more nuanced than that," he says. “Sales jobs require a lot of research and a lot of independent work."

Stewart asked me not to reveal the numerical sweet spot on his company’s 10-point, introvert-extrovert continuum. Suffice it to say, applicants who think they know what a prospective employer is looking for might be wrong, so gaming the system isn’t easy.

Karen Goumakos, general sales manager at Reagan Outdoor Advertising in Austin, Texas, uses Affintus’s personality test to scout for a range of character traits—including unexpected ones. Instead of looking for people with customer-is-always-right attitudes, she likes her sales reps to register as somewhat oppositional.

The reason: Clients don’t always know the best marketing strategy, and Goumakos wants employees who can shoot down bad ideas politely. She says the personality test is about one-third of the equation in hiring decisions and can be the reason why a person with a great résumé doesn’t get a job.

“Ordinarily you look for someone who has a certain amount of experience," she says, “but now we can find someone who might have less experience who’s wired in a way that they’re more likely to be successful."

Write to Callum Borchers at callum.borchers@wsj.com