Hiring Santa's Helpers

Anger. Daydreams. Ridicule. They’re not exactly topics you expect to come up in a job interview—particularly for a sales position at the local mall.

But with some retailers receiving more than 2 million résumés a year, they’ve come to rely on online psychological assessments to do much of the weeding.

Sure, stores have been giving candidates simple “integrity tests” for decades, but now, analysts say, the nosiness has reached a new level.

These days, tests screen for traits like conscientiousness, customer focus and sales aptitude—characteristics proven to correlate with retail success. But they don’t always take a direct approach. Target’s [TGT] form, for one, asks how much you daydream. Sears [SHLD] wants to know how often you get angry. (Sears says the question “helps evaluate work performance on the job.”) And Macy’s [M] 220-point assessment wonders how strongly you agree with the statement, “People deserve to be made fun of if they make a mistake.”

Many stores, in their quest to find employees who “embody the brand,” probe for interests and personal values. The Body Shop wants to know if applicants care about the environment and what magazines they read; candidates who fit the company culture stay longer and are more productive, says Al Kong, the firm’s human-resources director.

Think you’ll make the cut? Actually, a brilliant executive could flunk the conscientiousness test because he’s not a rule follower, says Caroline Paxman, chief product officer for PreVisor, which creates assessments for 13 of the top 20 U.S. retailers. But that just means the test is working. After all, says Paxman, an executive is hardly the best fit for a cashier job. Sure, you could do it, “but seriously, would you enjoy that role?”