Job Personality Tests.

If you’ve been looking for a job recently you’ve undoubtedly run into the latest Personnel Department Frankenstein’s monster, the personality test.

This thing is a complete joke but unfortunately numerous companies use them.
The problem with them is they don’t look to see if you would be a good employee, the old fashion looking over a persons resume and checking their references is a better way to do that. They check to see how well you fall for the corporate propaganda.

In order to do that they separate people into two types. The best example of the two types of people they look at would be the Dave Lettermen/Bill O’Rielly interview. In that interview Bill asked Dave, “Do you want to see us win in Iraq?” Dave gave a thoughtful answer comparing the cost to the US of continuing the war vs. the impact of the US withdrawing would mean.

Bill asked him the same question again, “Do you want to see us win in Iraq?” and followed it up with “Yes or No.”

Dave replied, “I can’t give you a Yes or No to a question that requires some thought, because I’m a thoughtful type of guy.”

Now you would think that a company would be looking for someone like Dave that would carefully think over their actions to make sure they aren’t costing the company huge amounts of money, but from what I’ve read they seem to be looking for the Bill O’Rielly type, someone who just reacts with no thought to the costs of that action.


Disclaimer: I have taken the personality tests over 50 times in the past few months and haven’t passed.


From what I’ve read (and what some companies have told me) they measure the speed of the test and the Strongly (ratio) giving people who strongly agree or disagree with a statement very quickly more weight than someone who carefully reads the question and then gives a measured answer.

If this is the type of person companies have been hiring over the past decade due to these tests, you would think that American Companies would just follow whatever the latest fad was that offered short term profits and not look at the long term costs that it could cost the company. With an attitude like that you would expect those companies to cheerfully join the charge and run at full speed right off the nearest cliff with no one taking the time to think for a second if it was a good idea.

As they run head long off that cliff I can picture them saying to each other, “How did this happen? The fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

In case you couldn’t guess I really hate those tests.