Ahopelto2026b
| Ahopelto2026b | |
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| BibType | PHDTHESIS |
| Key | Ahopelto2026b |
| Author(s) | Teija Ahopelto |
| Title | Who Knows Me? The use of personality tests in recruitment interaction |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, personality |
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| Year | 2026 |
| Language | English |
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| URL | Link |
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| Organization | Tampere University |
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Abstract
In this dissertation, I analyse moments of interaction during recruitment interviews wherein personality and related test results are discussed as part of the assessment process. Drawing on 21 recorded interviews and using tools from Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology, I examine how participants work to establish their right to define applicants’ personalities. Through three peer-reviewed articles and a summary of the related findings, I demonstrate how such negotiations reveal the ways in which power, knowledge and trust are intertwined situationally in the recruitment interviews. The analysis examines how psychological knowledge regarding personality emerges during a recruitment interview when the applicant’s personality is (1) tested, (2) noticed or (3) defined. First, I show how participants talk about the test reveals cultural preconceptions related to it and how, in these moments of interaction negotiate the test’s ability to ‘know’ about an applicant’s personality. Furthermore, I show how these negotiations function as a way of managing situational stakes. Second, I demonstrate how recruiting psychologists draw on their professional expertise to evaluate both the trustworthiness and the genuineness of applicants by assessing how consistent their personalities are perceived to be across test results, self-descriptions and interactional conduct. These meta-interactional personality noticings involve reflections on whether (or not) a particular trait becomes observable to others via the applicant’s behaviour during the encounter. Finally, I show how psychologists orient towards the authority of the test when validating applicants’ self-descriptions or accounting for specific features. In addition, I consider how, in these moments, applicants subtly claim their own epistemic right to know and define their personalities. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the assessment of personality is inherently situational and context-dependent. This dissertation highlights how the preconceptions of personality testing that participants orient towards shape the social encounters, simultaneously enabling and constraining the participants’ actions. In this way, recruitment interviews emerge as truth-finding encounters. During such interviews, psychological knowledge, both that produced by tests and that attributed by psychologists, is mobilized to instruct applicants about features of themselves that they may be unaware of and to manage an inherent scepticism towards applicants’ self-presentations, including the possibility of deception in their personalities and behaviours. Through these practices, psychologists establish confidence in applicants’ suitability for the position. Personality assessment thus becomes an interplay between institutional goals and participants’ management of credibility, stake and trust. This dissertation shifts the focus from questions concerning the validity of psychological measurement to the interactional processes whereby personality is assessed and made relevant, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of both the objectivity of assessment practices and their social consequences.
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