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New Personality Test May Be an Employment Game Changer

photo of Adam Meade
Adam Meade

Adam Meade, an associate professor of psychology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, dislikes the conventional personality tests typically used in the private sector. He believes these tests, often used for employment testing, can be easily faked.

Meade developed a software-based personality test based on response time to computer-prompted stimuli in order to eliminate any possibility of altering the true results.

“It takes time to think ‘OK, what does the employer want to hear?’,” says Meade. “Reasonably competent job applicants will agree with items asking about meeting deadlines, regardless of whether this truly describes them or not. When you force people to respond quickly, they have less time to be dishonest.”

With support from the NC State Chancellor’s Innovation Fund,  Meade and his research team are developing a Web-based version of the software and hope to have licensing agreements in place by spring. Meade says the employment testing tool could mark the beginning of a new era in employment testing and significantly influence how companies choose their employees.

See the full story, “Debunking Conventional Personality Tests,” in the NC State Bulletin.