2020年经济学人 巴托比专栏--打工人,你做过入职心理测试吗?(1)（在线收听）

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巴托比专栏

Questionable behaviour

别有用心的行为

Companies are relying more and more on psychometric tests

公司们越来越依赖心理计量测验

Here is a test. Assign a score of 1 to 5, where 1 is “strongly agree” and 5 is “strongly disagree”, to the following statement: “I really care about my work.” If you have answered that kind of question before, you have probably applied for a job at a large company. Psychometric tests, as they are called, have become increasingly popular.

这是一份测试。请针对下列表述：“我真的很在乎我的工作”，打1到5分，1分代表“非常同意”，5分代表“非常不同意”。如果你之前回答过这类问题，那你可能曾经申请过一家大公司的工作。这种所谓的心理测试已经变得越来越受青睐。

Eager job-seekers may think the answers to these questions are glaringly obvious. For any statement, give a response that creates a portrait of a diligent, collaborative worker. Of course, applicants care about their work, love collaborating with other people and pay careful attention to detail. But the people who set the tests know that candidates will respond this way. So questions are rephrased in many different ways to check that applicants are consistent and make it difficult for them to remember what they have already said.

迫切的求职者可能会觉得这些问题的答案显而易见。针对每一条表述，都要做出一个能够反映勤奋、协作的员工形象的回答。当然，求职者也要表明自己在乎工作、喜欢与他人合作、而且十分注重细节。但是设置这些入职测试的人知道应试者会以这样的方式进行作答。因此，他们会用多种不同的方式重新措辞这些问题，以检验求职者是否作答一致，而且还要让求职者们很难记得自己之前的答案。

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Aptitude tests are not a new idea. Intelligence tests have been around for a century and were popular with government departments. Charles Johnson, who has been involved in psychometric testing for 40 years and was responsible for constructing the tests used to recruit British civil servants, says the second world war had a big impact. The British were impressed with the efficiency of German army officers and learned they had been selected with the help of intelligence tests. This led the British to create the War Office Selection Board. Alongside verbal and non-verbal reasoning, it challenged candidates with word-association exercises and being made to lead group discussions.

能力倾向测试并不是一种新的想法。流传一个世纪的智力测试颇受政府部门的推崇。查理斯·约翰逊从事心理测试已经40年了，他负责构建用于招聘英国公职人员的测试。他说，二战的影响深远。英国人对德国军官的工作效率印象深刻，而且他们得知这些军官是通过情报测试选拔出来的。英国为此创建了陆军部选拔委员会。应试者除了要进行文字推理、非文字推理以外，还要挑战词汇联想练习、以及引导小组讨论。

For high-skilled jobs, these tests are useful. However, Mr Johnson says there is a risk with using such tests to recruit workers for low-skilled jobs. If you select people who pass sophisticated cognitive tests, they will learn the job quickly but will then get bored and leave.

对于高技能的工作岗位来说，这些测试是有用的。不过，约翰逊表示，利用此类测试为低技能工作岗位招聘员工的行为存在风险。如若你选拔的员工通过了复杂的认知测验，他们将很快掌握这份工作，但随即会觉得无聊并离职。

Psychometric tests became more popular from the 1970s onwards and are now seen as a useful way of sorting through the many candidates who apply for the jobs offered by big companies. “It is a laborious task to sort through thousands of written applications,” says Julia Knight, another occupational psychologist. “As well as being time consuming, it is not very effective and subject to bias.”

心理计量测验自20世纪70年代起开始变得越来越流行，目前人们认为它行之有效，可以对众多申请大公司工作岗位的求职者们进行筛选。另一位心理学家茱莉亚·奈特说：“整理上千份书面申请是一项艰巨的任务，这项任务耗时耗力，效率不高，还容易出现偏差。”