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Hellbent

honestly, honesty?

Is my friend reading into the questions too much?  

10 members have voted

  1. 1. Is my friend reading into the questions too much?

    • He\'s reading into it too much and should give the \'obvious\' answer
      2
    • You can\'t be too careful answering these questions
      4
    • some middle ground between the obvious answer and reading into the psychology....
      2
    • I have no frickin\' idea.
      2


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Okay, my friend got an interview at a good prescription meds sales job (wining and dining doctors to use their meds). He had to fill out a 300 true/false corporate exam. Here are some of the questions....


23. Do you feel bad if an animal is in pain?

24. Do you feel bad if you see a dog limping?

33. Do you like fast cars?

84. Do you want to be a race car driver?

103. Do you ever get very angry with your coworkers?

116. Do you ever not do something your boss tells you to do?

145. Would there ever be a justifiable reason to steal from work?


Let's start with the first one. If you say no to 23 and 24 then you might be labeled a sociopath. On the other hand, if you show too much empathy for others, then you might not have the mettle to push a questionable drug that could cause people harm. So do you answer 23 yes and 24 no?

Question 84 is linked to 33, but just because my friend likes fast cars, doesn't mean he wants to be a racecar driver, does it? Are they looking for consistency? Why do they care at all if you like fast cars or not?

103. My friend does get angry with his coworkers.... He thinks if you answer no, then that might show you are not passionate about your job--that you are too complacent and a push over or something... Yet, obviously, the obvious answer is to say no, I don't. Because if you do, then it might show you are a hot headed difficult person... BUT... will he even have coworkers at this job? he is alone on the road wining and dining doctors to buy subscriptions.... what's the psychology behind these questions for a sales position of possible questionable ethical integrity?

116. If you say the "obvious" response, then you might come across like a sheep who just does what he's told without thinking about the consequences--without demonstrating that you have a moral and ethical conscience. ie: if your boss tells you to push a medicine that you know has killed people and that the corrupt FDA let go through, then maybe you are a bad fit for the company since you are capable of doing bad things... or maybe that's exactly what they want since they are a company that is unethical (we don't know if they are unethical or not--what they want from a sales person.. but we can imagine they are not the most ethical people on the planet.....

145. Not sure why you would not answer the obvious answer here... any ideas? Thanks for your consideration in the nebulous psychological profiling of these corporate exam questions. Is my friend reading into them too much? What do you think?

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Much of this bureaucracy means little if your interviewer likes and forms a good opinion of you. Also, if you have a kick ass work experience.

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Usually the 'real' questions are much more subtle, and snuck in between the more shocking ones. The main job of these questions is to make you less wary of the questions that really tell things about you.

tl;dr: these are bullshit questions meant to distract you from the real ones.

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The questions are meaningless because they have no context, and it's not possible to provide one in your answers. Were I given such a test, I wouldn't bother to actually waste time even considering my answers, since they can't be articulated. Instead, I'd just slip into RNG mode. ;-)

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I think I have actually seen the questionnaire you refer to; there are a bunch of other questions like "Do you believe medical marijuana should be legalized?", "Given the choice, would you live in a state that allows legal same-sex marriages?", and the one that blew my mind the most, "Do you believe in the separation of church and state?"

Why would a job application ask that sort of stuff?! Talk about wearing company politics on their sleeves - I actually refused to finish that questionnaire, because I don't think that shit is anybody's business but my own.

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I'd rather answer honestly than second guess it. If I'm going to 'fail' the exam I'd prefer to do so based on my own values. I'd feel much worse if I tried to guess what they wanted to hear and failed anyway.

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99% of the time nobody looks to see your answer to these questions. They're essentially to quantify the qualities employers want in an employee. These sort applicants into three categories: "Ideal" (which we'll call green), "Acceptable" (yellow), and "Poor" (red). Usually around 75% "correct" answers gets you put in the Green pile, and around 25% and below gets filed in Red and essentially rejected. If you get stuck in the Yellow pile you may still be considered if the employer runs out of ideal candidates, but they still get first dibs.

That's about all those questionnaires do. Essentially they don't even measure a person's personality but more their capacity to understand what the employer is looking for. Much like how IQ tests basically just measure a person's ability to successfully take tests than actually measure intelligence capacity.

Also, Protip: most of these use an answer scheme of "Strongly Agree, Agree, Not Sure/Neutral, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree." The "strongly" answers influence the system the most so if you're picking the obvious answers make sure you're ticking those particular boxes even if it isn't TOTALLY the technically correct attitude. For example if the question/statement is "I rarely get mad at my co-workers" you want to pick "Strongly Agree" even though it'd be more realistic that you WOULD probably get frustrated with your coworkers once in a while.

I've done so many of these goddamn things I could probably do them in my sleep.

WildWeasel said:

I think I have actually seen the questionnaire you refer to; there are a bunch of other questions like "Do you believe medical marijuana should be legalized?", "Given the choice, would you live in a state that allows legal same-sex marriages?", and the one that blew my mind the most, "Do you believe in the separation of church and state?"


Pretty sure the latter two questions are not legal to include in any kind of hiring process (in the US). They're not allowed to ask you anything regarding race, religion, gender, or even marital status or if you have kids. If they do, feel free to report them in violation of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act. The first one there I'm not sure if that's ethically kosher to ask either, but I guess I don't see why they couldn't legally.

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Hellbent said:

Question 84 is linked to 33, but just because my friend likes fast cars, doesn't mean he wants to be a racecar driver, does it? Are they looking for consistency? Why do they care at all if you like fast cars or not?

Do the same questions show up on several different applications for many types of jobs? I haven't applied for a job in ten years and I don't even know if we have this sort of thing in the UK. But it seems a rather weird thing to ask someone who's applying to work in the pharmaceutical business. Or any business expect the motor industry or a motor racing team, for that matter. It's like asking someone if they like movies or music of video games or some other recreational activity.

I'm going to say that these childish questions are there to measure your ability to fill out a dumb questionnaire :/

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I work for a Local Authority in England and have never known anyone to complete such questionnaires. Indeed, I was involved in both internal and external recruitment recently and I would consider such a shortlisting technique a waste of time. The level of admin work required simply by sticking to role relevant selection practices is enough without a 145+ question long pop-quiz added to it.

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Hellbent said:

Okay, my friend got an interview at a good prescription meds sales job (wining and dining doctors to use their meds). He had to fill out a 300 true/false corporate exam. Here are some of the questions....

It's actually great that he's been given this questionnaire, because it's a great indicator that this is probably the kind of place you never want to work for.

The biggest problem I see with a test like this is that there are a bunch of questions with answers that you're obviously supposed to give, but if you were to answer honestly you'd have to give the opposite answer. Because it's a yes/no binary choice there's no way to elaborate on why you gave that answer. For example:

145. Would there ever be a justifiable reason to steal from work?

The operating word is "ever". It's rare that there would ever be a justifiable reason to steal from work. But can anyone justifiably say that there would never, ever be a justifiable reason to do it? Remember that these are medical supplies. Suppose there's some kind of emergency situation where using them might save someone's life. That would count as a "justifiable reason" in my book. But it's pretty obvious how you're supposed to answer.

Basically this is an awful way of testing anyone. If the purpose really is to select smart people (ie. "it's possible there might be a situation where stealing is actually the right thing"), then it doesn't give any insight into their thought process and why they selected that answer. If, as I suspect, it's actually to select people who will shut up and do what they're told, it's also awful, because the "right" answers are obvious to anyone able to read.

So either way you look at it, this test is a waste of time. From your perspective though, it tells you all you need to know: that (1) this place is staffed by incompetent people who use these sorts of tests, (2) your future colleagues will probably be morons because anyone can pass the test, and (3) it probably has a horrible internal culture where employees are treated like automatons or cattle rather than actual human beings.

WildWeasel said:

I think I have actually seen the questionnaire you refer to; there are a bunch of other questions like "Do you believe medical marijuana should be legalized?", "Given the choice, would you live in a state that allows legal same-sex marriages?", and the one that blew my mind the most, "Do you believe in the separation of church and state?"

That's pretty disgusting. I'd expect that in most western countries, some questions like this would be straight-up illegal. I don't know what it's like in the US, though. I give interviews at work and there are certain subjects (like race, sexuality, religion, etc.) that we are told to completely avoid at all costs because it could lead to the company getting sued.

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I've taken a number of these throughout my days in high school, though there was never a question concerning animals being harmed or that sort of thing. Still, one company actually showed me the results of my quiz, and by fuck, I scored a yellow in the 'sociability' category (something in the 40% bracket). It was right around then that I decided to apply strictly to small and local businesses for the remainder of high school.

Basically, I've yet to take another one of those things even when I apply to larger companies. This is because if one were to pop up, I'd just say fuck it and leave the job to someone else.

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Jobs in pharmaceuticals are pretty bureaucratic. They don't want people who'll mess around. That said, this seems like the personality assessment that McDonalds gives out with their applications-- so... yeah, corporate bureaucracy bullshitâ„¢. Fill out what the obvious correct answers are and hope that the person he gets the interview with isn't some mindless stooge with another checklist in his hands.

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Aliotroph? said:

Heh, that's what I thought when I saw the animal questions.

The "test" is bullshit and a number of the questions on it would be deemed unsuitable, even illegal, in many places.

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The test I had to do for a job in Dell's call centre was crazy. It was three hours long and divided into three sections. The first was language skills, the second was listening to generic Americans and picking responses quickly (yes, there were a couple black people in there), and the last was technical questions. Pretty sure they didn't care if we did very well on the technical questions, but people were getting booted early in the other sections.

They didn't do any personality stuff outside of job interview standards (tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker, etc.). They did, however, do personality tests and such as part of our training at various points. This was to point out the range of personalities customers have compared with technicians and learn how to deal with them.

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I had to complete similar questionnaires to apply to places like Wal-Mart and McDonalds online, seriously. It was absolutely pointless. I never got anything weird about animals in pain but most of them were (or appeared to be) completely irrelevant to the mind-numbingly easy job I was applying for.

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That sounds like something from the MMPI, except that's more around 550 questions, and usually tied to more sensitive jobs.

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hex11 said:

The questions are meaningless because they have no context, and it's not possible to provide one in your answers.

This x1000.

Seriously though, companies use this shit? I guess I've been lucky enough to not have seen one in a job-seeking context, because I've never had to take anything of the sort except in high school maybe (in which anything's pretty much guaranteed to be BS :P ).

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