[baron_harkonnen]

It should not be surprising at all. How many companies have you worked at where part of your performance review involves dividing and averaging ordinal numbers?

If you give someone some sort of numeric rating in N categories you cannot mathematically (trivially) average these rating to get a meaningful score.

Ordinal numbers only allow you to say A is greater than B and B is greater than C therefore A is greater than C, but it says nothing about the distance between A and B, B and C and A and C.

Yet at countless companies compensation is determined by literally nonsensical mathematical operations.

Before the pedants get me, there are ways to transform ordinal numbers to do perform more complex mathematical operations on them, but I can assure you that your HR department does not do these.

So given HR's disregard for basic principles of mathematics it should not be surprising that they find the variety of personality tests worthwhile.

[Terretta]

HR isn’t spending time on this ritual for performance reasons, but for risk management. It doesn’t serve your desired purpose, and the math would make no sense. Yet it perfectly satisfices what’s asked of them.

// https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing