Nowadays more and more foreign enterprises and companies are no longer relying on interviews for employment.Years of studying interviewing have made clear that it is not a very objective process.Personnel officers often hire the person they like best, or even the one they think most physically attractive.Looking good is no guarantee of doing the job well, however.Uglies or those who are aesthetically(审美地)challenged, lose heart.
To get a more objective view, many companies are also using psychological tests to hire both for relatively routine jobs and for positions at senior levels of management.It is impossible to say how many employers use tests, but estimates of test sales in the UK for 1993 were over 1 million.
The basic reason employers use tests is clear: tests claim to be scientific and objective.A large body of research has shown that interviews by themselves are not very reliable as a method of selection.People’s judgements are often very subjective: whether they like the look of someone counts for more than almost anything else.But reliable and valid tests can offer rapid and more objective information about a would-be employee.If a candidate talks well in an interview but his test results suggest that he is a careless person who cannot concentrate, an employer is likely to think twice about hiring him.
Taking a serious test for a job is rather different from taking a game-like test.You can spend just a little in answering questions of that kind of test, and you deny the answers and say they are not accurate.But you cannot go to a serious test without enough preparation since you can not afford to be denied and removed again and again.