The History and Application of Personality Testing in the Workplace

We’ve all had some experience with personality testing in one way or another. Since the beginning of the twentieth century personality testing and psychological assessments have been a staple in the recruitment and selection processes in all manner of position. Be it high level executives down to janitors, no candidate is immune to what has become a trusted and normal practice in recruiting. There is currently a long-standing debate among HR professionals and sociologists alike regarding the effectiveness and relevance of testing and its application in making hiring decisions. In order to understand the effectiveness or lack thereof in regards to personality testing one must take a holistic approach and understand the historic development and application in terms of recruiting. Personality testing traces its roots to the industrial revolution. Social scientists were attempting to discover a means by which to quantify employee skills in order to streamline the hiring process and select the most qualified ,and in some cases, the most predisposed candidates for certain jobs. In 1913, a Harvard professor, Dr. Hugo Muntsburger sought to find a correlation between personality characteristics and job success. He began by surveying executives as to which personality traits they found most important in employees, and began developing testing methods to identify said characteristics. Dr. Muntsburger’s colleague Henry Link took the theory of personality testing to the next logical step when he published ‘Employment Psychology’ in 1919. The work outlines, in very scientific detail, the link between personality traits and psychological testing with regards to employee selection. Dr. Link was not, however, a hard-line advocate and even went so far to caution against overvaluing psychological analysis when making hiring decisions. Link, however, was unable to fully quantify the benefits to using psychoanalysis as a means to support and promote recruitment

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