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Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test: High Cost with Inaccurate Results

August 2, 2014 by Brent Kleiman Leave a Comment

Companies often use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) to determine which of the sixteen personality types candidates, new hires, or employees possess. It is also often used by human resource professionals to build teams with personality types that work well together or to help co-workers interact more effectively with each other. More than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities and 200 government agencies in the United States use the test, according to Lillian Cunningham in the Washington Post.

Developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, the test uses the theory of psychological types described by psychologist Carl Jung and attempts to make the types understandable and useful in individuals and groups, according to the Myers-Briggs site.

CPP is a private company that is the exclusive publisher of the MBTI. They also offer certification programs and sell over 800 other related products. While the Myers-Briggs assessment can be taken online for $49.95, individuals administering the assessment and interpreting and applying the results must be certified. Those who meet the education eligibility requirements do not require certification. CPP warns that the educational eligibility requirement only allows individuals to purchase and administer tests; however, “[o]nly those practitioners who attend and successfully complete a certification program for an instrument will be granted the Certified Practitioner designation for that instrument.” The purpose of certification, which costs $1,695.00 plus shipping and taxes, create practitioners who have “an in-depth understanding of the best and most ethical ways to administer the assessment,” according to the CPP website.

However, recently professionals are beginning to doubt the effectiveness and morality of the MBTI. Cunningham points out that CPP’s profit from the “cultlike [SIC] devotion among its practitioners” is roughly $20 million annually. She points out how CPP makes millions off of this personality test through “the elaborate business model and enormous marketing push that have enthroned MBTI in the pantheon of human resources programs.” The business model forces both the person giving the test and the person taking it to pay. The company’s sales team urges HR professionals in companies across the globe to get certified in order to benefit from the test results. CPP even offers sample, formatted letters for business professionals to print out and give to management to justify the expense of an MBTI certification.

Yet the most questionable part of the MBTI is not that a company distributes and profits from it, but that there is no scientific basis for using it.

Myers Briggs began developing the test in her family room in 1921, having no training other than having read a variety of psychology-related books. No major scientific journal has published research on the assessment. Even the three psychologists who work with CPP have not included Myers-Briggs in their own published studies.

Even the theories used in the MBTI, which are based on Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types, were unsupported and without controlled experiments or data. Jung himself stated that these types were only based on his own observations and were merely approximate categories. “Every individual is an exception to the rule,” Jung wrote.

Joseph Stromberg, author with the Vox, notes that several analyses show the MBTI test is not only unable to predict a person’s success within the workplace, but also that approximately half of those who take the test a second time, get different results, himself included.

Even with its high profile and high profits, the Myers-Briggs test does not appear to be any more accurate at determining profiles than a Facebook quiz.

Generation Z: How We Can Set Ourselves Up For a Golden Age of Entrepreneurship

March 9, 2014 by Brent Kleiman Leave a Comment

As new millennials, move into the job market (or back into their parents’ basements) and those on the tailend begin to find themselves in top management positions, industry leaders are focusing their gaze on Generation Z.

Referring to those born from the mid 1990s through today, Gen Z is still too young to be given a moniker like baby boomers or millennials. However, recent reports have started to speculate how Generation Z will impact the next several decades of global commerce.

This new wave, fueled by technology savvy and innovation, is expected to have a greater zeal for enterprise than the generations that came before. It is “poised to become the most entrepreneurial generation we’ve ever seen,” says Entrepreneur’s Dan Schawbel, the founder of millennial branding. While Gen Y, the generation that came of age at the turn of the twenty-first century, “is known for ‘side gigs’ and having multiple careers, Gen Z is more focused on working for themselves.”

Gen Z is recognized as the first generation teethed on smart phones and tablets. This technology-based nativity will be advantageous as Gen. Z enters the workforce, but earlier exposure to better technology isn’t the only explanation for Generation Z’s industrious flair.

Corporations and education systems are beginning focus more than ever on high schoolers’ entrepreneurial skills by exposing them to the business world earlier in life. Companies like Microsoft are offering internships to high-schoolers interested in tech innovation, Berkeley and Columbia both offer entrepreneurial courses to high school students, and organizations like Junior Achievement and the NFIB’s Young Entrepreneur Foundation give kids an outlet to develop entrepreneurial skills through awards and scholarships.

One of the many signs that younger generations are becoming more interested in the startup culture is Mattel’s Entrepreneur Barbie, which went on sale last month and comes equipped with her own smartphone and tablet.

In a day and age when young people look up to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as the digital superheroes of the 21st century, many countries across the world are putting a lot of pressure on Generation Z to develop new industries that will create jobs.

Schawbel explains that this is to be expected, seeing as Gen Z has access to resources that X and Y didn’t have at their age. Thanks to the internet, Gen Z has a wealth of information at the tips of its fingers, and it also easier than ever for younger generation to take advantage of new entrepreneurial networks like The Thiel Fellowship and Start-Up Grind, many of which have only started or gained momentum within the last decade.

These types of organizations, often driven by social media, allow young entrepreneurs to network and find mentors in their field. Millennials and baby boomers did not receive such opportunities until they entered college or the workforce. Millennial youngsters had hoped to work for their dream company; members of Generation Z aspire to build their dream company.

“Governments are increasingly looking to entrepreneurs and start-ups to both kick-start their economies and provide the jobs that will sustain growth,” says Maria Pinelli of Ernst & Young (EY). Young entrepreneurs understand the vital role their businesses play in the economy and are beginning to expect government organizations to work with them in order to create jobs and bolster economic growth.

In a white paper produced for the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance, analysts from EY implore governments to encourage Gen Z’s Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) development through “five key imperatives for action”:

Expand the choice of funding alternatives: Money must be easily accessible to prospective entrepreneurs for start-ups to get off the ground.
Increased mentoring and broader support: Funding accessed by young entrepreneurs is wasted if not backed by mentorship and strong support systems.
Change the culture to tolerate failure: To be an entrepreneur is to view failure as a learning experience. Gen Z will thrive in a culture that tolerates failure so that they can take the risks necessary to create real economic growth.
Target and speed up incentives: Governments need to recognize how important tax and innovation incentives are for entrepreneurs hoping to grow their businesses and become the job creators of the 21st century.
Reduce red tape and excessive taxation: Tax incentives like The Small Business Job Act, and more public institutions dedicated to fostering new businesses will create a comfortable entrepreneurial climate for Generation Z to nurture their start-ups.

Companies with fewer than 250 employees represent around two-thirds of G20 employment. They are also more likely than larger firms to provide jobs to the unemployed and create new jobs at twice the rate.

“Entrepreneurs develop new ideas and create jobs. They borrow at one rate to produce a higher return,” says Stephen Aarstol, of Tower Paddel Boards. “In the process, entrepreneurs create products and services that add value to others. When this process is permitted to flourish, the collective productivity of the nation increases.”

“Findings show that young entrepreneurs are optimistic about their future,” reports Pinelli, “and recognize that their businesses — and many more like them — have a crucial role to play in tackling the youth unemployment crisis.”

Employee Misclassification: Learning from the Lawsuit Against Yurcor and The Mill

March 4, 2014 by Matthew Kosinski Leave a Comment

Companies who work with freelance and temporary workers may want to note recent developments in the class action lawsuit filed against visual effects production company The Mill and contingent workforce management company Yurcor. The Mill and Yurcor have agreed to settle for $1.35 million, pending court approval.

While the settlement is not an admission of liability by the defendants, the lawsuit and its outcome may serve as cautionary tales for both short-term workers and their employers.

The Lawsuit

In 2010, when Steve Kaplan became the labor organizer for The Animation Guild (TAG), visual effects artists who had worked on short-term projects at The Mill asked him to look into Yurcor’s business practices. These artists had questions about withholdings they had noticed in their paychecks.

Instead of hiring visual effects artists directly, The Mill was using Yurcor’s employer of record services — a fairly common arrangement in which a third-party (such as Yurcor) acts as the legal employer of a contractor while the contractor works for another company (such as The Mill). Such agreements are generally made for tax purposes: the employer of record handles payroll and all associated taxes, meaning the contractor and the company don’t have to worry about them. In this case, Yurcor was the legal employer of the artists who worked at The Mill. Yurcor was only “lending” these artists out to The Mill on a temporary basis.

After researching the suspicious withholdings, Kaplan found that Yurcor was allegedly withholding money from employee paychecks to cover company taxes. “That kind of infuriated me,” Kaplan said of the realization.

Under the employer of record arrangement, Yurcor was the employer of the artists. In the state of California, it is illegal for employees to pay employer taxes. According to Kaplan, this is exactly what Yurcor was doing: “At the time, paycheck stubs reflected employee tax and employer tax,” he said. “So they were being very brazen about the fact that they were using employee wages to pay their share of payroll taxes.”

Kaplan spoke with TAG attorney Stuart Libicki, who felt that he could take legal action against The Mill and Yurcor to recover the artists’ lost wages. Libicki also believed that he had significant evidence that Yurcor was engaging in employee misclassification. Once Libicki found artists who were willing to be named as plaintiffs, he was able to move ahead and file the lawsuit.

Employee Misclassification

The California Department of Industrial Relations defines employee misclassification as “voluntarily and knowingly misclassifying an employee as an independent contractor.” A worker legally counts as an employee if an employer controls their work and an independent contractor if an employer does not. For example: the customer service representative who handles a company’s phones all day is an employee; the consultant a company brings in to streamline the call center is an independent contractor.

Employee misclassification harms everyone involved: misclassified employees do not have the legal protections of unemployment insurance, minimum wage or worker’s compensation; the general public is forced to subsidize misclassified employees because these employees are not paying into Social Security, health insurance benefits or Medicare; the employers who misclassify workers not only expose their workers to potential abuse, but also leave themselves open to lawsuits like the one filed against The Mill and Yurcor.

“Yurcor took advantage of a prevailing practice in [the visual effects industry] of misclassifying employees,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan explained that misclassification is common in the visual effects industry because “there is a consistent and regular and overbearing pressure to lower the cost of visual effects to the production entity.” Because a lot of production companies only need visual effects artists for short-term projects, they do not want to incur the costs of hiring an employee directly, like paying for unemployment insurance and Medicare. By misclassifying artists as independent contractors, companies illicitly avoid these costs. “Why spend that money? It’s another corner they can cut,” Kaplan said.

A company like Yurcor is attractive to employers because it gets between the employer and the employee, allowing the employer to shift the burden of employee costs onto a third party. Yurcor’s mistake, in this case, was allegedly trying to pass employer costs off onto the employees.

What Companies and Contingent Work Need to Know

Kaplan offers advice to workers who may operate in a freelance environment: “Become more aware of the law and [your] rights,” he said. “Understand that, if you’re going to be working for somebody who is trying to cut a corner, that gives you leverage.”

The flipside of the advice should be clear to employers: regardless of how attractive it may seem, do not try to cut those corners in the first place.

More Than a Job Board: Recroup Helps Companies and Job Seekers Find the Right Fit

March 3, 2014 by Brent Kleiman Leave a Comment

In 2012, Amit Chauhan was working as Marketing Major at Heurion Consulting in India. He attended an open call for interviews at Google and found a “two-mile long queue” of applicants hoping to get hired by the search engine giant. Chauhan likened the experience to a Best Buy on the night before the release of a new video game. As he looked at this line of thousands of people, he wondered if the challenge was greater for the job seeker, who must stand out among the thousands, or for the HR manager, who must sort through thousands of resumes to find the best talent.

Chauhan never finished the interview with Google. He had a better idea: streamline the hiring process for the workforce. Along with CTO Shiv Bharthur and Kaushik Vinay TG Design Head, Chauhan created Recroup, a “Career Launchpad.” Job seekers aren’t the only ones who can expect “more than a standard job board” from Recroup — Recruiters are offered one job posting per month for free, four jobs at $100, and eight jobs for $150.

Social Integration

Recroup was officially launched in 2013 with one clear goal in mind, said Chauhan. “We want to give job seekers a platform to stand out from the crowd,” he said. The company offers a place for job seekers, particularly those seeking entry-level positions, to showcase their talents in a way that resumes alone cannot.

Recroup rewards job seekers with badges for activities both on and off the site, including social media activity. The badges are simply electronic images which are given after a user completes a certain activity. For instance, if a user posts a new status to Facebook, he may receive a badge. If friends comment and like his status, he may receive another badge. The social integration feature of Recroup allows job seekers to receive credit for their social activity without actually displaying any activity to recruiters. Hiring managers are able to calculate potential employees’ engagement levels through the feature. Chauhan said that recruiters often want “to check social profiles for a cultural fit and job seekers want to protect their privacy.”

The team at Recroup constantly meets with various HR managers in order to get recommendations and advice about the system. These critiques have been positive and have helped the team to grow and change the platform. “No one in the team comes from a recruiting background… [so] I regularly meet with recruiters or HR managers to get feedback,” Chauhan said.

Challenges

Instead of relying on self-reported skill sets, Recroup verifies users’ skills through company challenges. Recruiters can create challenges that range from the simple to the complex, depending on the position that is available, said Chauhan. The company website states that job seekers can allow their work to speak for itself through the challenges which can be “anything from writing a sales pitch to building a small site.”

“The goal of the company challenges is to ask talent to get involved from the get-go,” Chauhan said. When properly utilized, challenges allow recruiters to screen candidates on real skills right from the start. Recroup is also working towards making challenges in real-time.

Perk Board

Recruiters pursue employees who are not only skilled, but who will fit with the company culture. More job seekers also want a career that fits with their personality, not one that merely offers a paycheck. Recroup understands that, so they have developed the Company Perk Board.

According to Chauhan, companies spend money not only on attracting talent, but on company perks meant to retain talent. He said that 85 percent of people do not know about these “extras,” even though many job seekers want to know what a company offers besides a salary. The Perk Board allows companies to display their employee benefits, which include sleep pods at Google, on-site ball pits at Intuit and hi-tech toilets at Facebook.

Chauhan adds that the board acts as a branding page for companies as they garner interest in candidates. Chauhan thought of the Company Perk Board while in the shower, “where all good ideas stem”, he laughed. Chauhan realizes the importance of “giving job seekers access to the company culture before they join,” which is exactly what Recroup is all about.

The Dangers of Workplace Bullying and How to Find A Solution

February 25, 2014 by Laurie Harley Leave a Comment

Bullying in public schools receives quite a lot of media attention. Intimidation and verbal abuse sometimes lead young people to taking their own lives. On Feb. 14, 2014, 15-year-old Jayah Ram Jackson, a New York City high school student, jumped to her death from the roof of her grandmother’s apartment building. Zachary Stieber of the Epoch Times reported that Jackson, a student at New Explorations into Science, Technology, and Math (NEST+m) school for the gifted, had been told that she needed to “get prettier, smarter or dead.” On Jan. 5, Jackson posted on her Facebook account that “[a]t least [eight] people have told me they want me to kill myself in the past [two] days.” And that’s what she did.

Bullying has reached epidemic proportions. While the media focuses mostly on bullied teenagers, they are not the only ones who face bullies daily. Workplace bullying is often brushed aside and unreported by victims. Yet bullying is still as emotionally devestating in the workplace as it is in the classroom; it can spoil a company’s culture, causing a drop in productivity and a rise in absenteeism and turnover. Workplace bullying, which can include verbal assaults, remarks phrased as “jokes,” and physical intimidation, is a serious offense that HR departments should handle immediately.

Workplace Bullying Survey

Do HR departments handle reports of bullying effectively? The Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) conducted a survey in 2010 in conjunction with Zogby International, collecting data on adult Americans with regard to workplace bullying. This was the second study of its kind; the first was undertaken in 2007. The results were appalling.

Thirty-five percent of workers in the study admitted to having been bullied in the workplace, and 15 percent of employees reported witnessing it. According to the study, employees’ bosses made up a whopping 72 percent of bullies in the office. Bullying was four times more prevalent than harassment based on illegal discrimination, according to the 2007 study. The data also showed that 68 percent of workplace bullying was same-gender harassment, which “is mostly legal according to anti-discrimination laws and workplace policies,” the study says.

Daniel Christensen of the Workplace Bullying Institute said that a new scientific study of workplace bullying for 2014 will be released in the week of February 24th. The survey will address the role that an HR department has in putting a stop to bullying in the office. Christiansen said the results of the 2014 survey showed that 72 percent of employers “reacted to complaints in inappropriate ways;” 25 percent didn’t investigate the complaint; 31 percent considered it routine or “discounted it as not serious;” 11 percent of employers actually defended the bullies; and 5 percent “actively encouraged the abuse.”

HR departments must take a stance on bullying in order to protect the culture of the company and the wellbeing of its employees. Susan M. Heathfield writes in “How to Deal with a Bully at Work” that the WBI study showed that “81 [percent] of employers are perceived as doing nothing and resisting taking action when targets of bullying.” Human Resources departments must do something to change this statistic.

Christiansen writes that if complaints are not handled properly, “workers become too scared to report” further instances of bullying. Oftentimes, bullies will retaliate with increased abuse when victims make a report against them, even if HR departments do not properly respond to the accusations. Additionally, Heathfield reports that 45 percent of victims “experience stress-related health problems including debilitating anxiety, panic attacks, and clinical depression.”

Dealing with Bullies

“The comprehensive approach to dealing with workplace bullying starts with clear policies and procedures faithfully enforced for all employees at all levels,” Christensen said. If an anti-bullying policy is in place and consistently followed, employers need not worry about accusations of favoritism or “a culture of fear,” he said.

It may be difficult to follow up on a report of an alleged bully. Managers cannot take one individual’s word over another’s. If the company has a history of ignoring complaints, then “HR managers will find it very difficult to get co-workers to corroborate a complaint,” Christensen said. Signs of bullying include excessive turnover in a particular department, previous instances of bullying, changes in a victim’s previously consistent work history and other workers suddenly avoiding the victim.

“Workplace bullying is a pattern of abuse,” said Christensen, and it must be handled before it infects the workplace culture and results in lost productivity and increased medical issues among workers. Christensen said the first step in controlling this bullying epidemic is for companies “to explicitly denounce the behavior instead of tacitly encouraging it.” HR departments need to be aware of the potential problem, adequately trained to deal with bulling, and equipped with policies and procedures to help alleviate bullying. Bullying is not just a problem in schools; it is also a drain on a company’s success.