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For a tech magazine editing job, I once had to take a "personality test"
that was absolutely required before you advanced in the hiring process. I
think they sought to determine if I was an objective or subjective
personality.
The word-association test seemed transparently obvious to me: do you pick
the creative answer or the mundane boring one that everybody else would
think of? Even though I love to be creative, it was clear which way I should
answer if I wanted a job....
I later did some industrial-strength aptitude testing on my own with the
Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation. (Highly recommended if you got the
dough to shell out.) They claim that the best editors have an objective
personality, a high ability to work with printed symbols, and high
analytical reasoning.
Seems like a psych profile is questionable, but an aptitude profile might
actually be quite beneficial to matching employee to job. However,
contrasting the careful testing that Johnson O'Connor administered to the
employer alluded to above and the toy aptitude tests from college and high
school days suggests to me that most such testing is pretty slap-dash....
