Peter Day's Personality

[Billy McGee]

Sorry, I got names and titles mixed up again!


I must say (this week’s In Business), one wouldn’t have to be an expert on psychometric testing to conclude that Mr. Day didn’t enjoy relaxing! I always had my intellectual running shorts on when he presented ‘The Financial World Tonight’! Pheweeee, what a job keeping up with him – interviews with Brain Marber, Bronwen Wood, Paul Volker, The Graham Ferguson Lacey affair, The Collapse of Dunbee Combex, the disappearance of Keith Hunt. What a fine programme this was – and I still worry about Heather Paton sounding as though she had a sore throat!

I’ve worked in companies where the (so-called) high-flying managers were selected on the basis of psychometric tests. They were all a load of cr*p – the only ‘skill’ I detected was an ability to export their own incompetence. If psychometric testing actually did work, then one wouldn’t have seen The WorldCom collapse, Ferranti/International Signal debacle, GEC, North West/Delta filing under Chapter11……… continued P164.

[Crusoe]

I rarely listen to this programme, I think because I perceive it as something being aimed at “businessmen” and not really relevant to me but I suppose that’s a bit short-sighted, given that we are all employed by and dependent upon businesses of one sort or another. Certainly, when I listen to Peter Day, he sounds very authoritative on his subject, although his voice sometimes sounds a little harsh.

I can understand your reservations about psychometric testing, although I get the impression that many top jobs are immune form it, being based upon an old boys’ network (I think of Gerald Corbet being in charge of Railtrack during the Hatfield debacle, resigning with a huge pay-off and then immediately being appointed to the board of Woolworth’s). I suspect that, just as IQ tests test people’s ability to do IQ tests, psychometric tests probably test people’s ability to do psychometric tests.

Having said that, it may be that the tests provide a good profile of the individual but that the criteria being set by the recruiters is wrong. For example, they may decide that they want to employ aggressive, competitive people because they believe that this will maintain business “edge” and make the company more competitive, whereas, in reality, this competitiveness may be directed towards the new employee’s colleagues, rather than to the company’s competitors.