If You're So Smart, Why Are You in HR?
Craig Newmark links to this somewhat infuriating article about how the doofuses in HR try to determine a candidate's true personality. Here's a few examples of how clever they think they are:

Some interviewers have been known to call job seekers at home and pose as telemarketers to gauge how those candidates react. Are they rude? Do they yell? Or are they polite but insistent that they don't want to purchase anything?

How a candidate deals with an annoying telemarketing call tells the company something about how you would deal with an annoying client.

Let me just stop here. It does no such thing. There is absolutely no similarity between someone who calls you trying to get to you give them money, and an annoying client, who is usually someone who helps pay your salary.

Here is more of this crap:

One of Lance's favorite behavior tests is to drop her pen at some point during the interview and see how the candidate reacts. She makes sure to drop it an equal distance from herself and the job seeker.

"When they are telling you that they are customer-oriented and you drop your pen and they don't notice or they don't pick it up, it's a disconnect between how they are and what they are saying," she said.

I guarantee this has never happened and she is lying. It's a pen, not a bean bag. She can't just drop it and make sure it lands "equal distance from herself and the job seeker". There are just to many variables. Its going to be closer to one person 90% of the time. Usually if a female drops something near me I will make an effort to at least appear gentlemanly, but if it is a dude, unless it falls at my feet, I'm probably not going to move.

Last one:

Lunch or dinner meetings also are ideal settings for giving away hidden personality traits. Lance said she has heard of hiring managers who spill something on a candidate to see how he or she reacts. Some hiring managers will have a potential candidate drive them to a lunch meeting to see what kind of driver he or she is: hurried and aggressive, or courteous and careful?

If someone spills something on me and I later find out it was just a test to see how I would react, what I usually do is find that person's car and slash their tires, just to see how they'd react.