Personality Tests: Tool or Weapon?
Should a personality test determine your employment?
Many people make the choice not to move forward with a company or interview process that requires personality tests, and perhaps for good reason.
The documentary, Persona, was heartbreakingly eye-opening as it unveiled the potentially massive gap between actual science and today's commonly required screening tests. Equally jarring are the tests' input -- often biased -- and criteria, yielding an output that eliminates many qualified candidates while branding them with a fixed personality type.
Let's say your Myers-Briggs test results brand you as a ENTP (Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Prospecting) type or a INJF (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Judging) -- should this cross-section of unscientifically-backed information justify disqualify or even qualify a candidate? How weighted are these tests by employers, and should they be a factor at all?
Corporations are investing millions in personality screening products, and we could be sitting at the apex of needing to take a microscope to the candidate selection process. While third-party personality tests and machine-learning algorithms optimize the volume of applicants, the human behind it could be missing out...and potentially so is the corporation.
Check out the trailer.
