Personality Tests Suck
A quick Google search for “personality test” turns up 7.2 million hits. A long list of snake oil salesmen and fortune tellers promising that their personality profile will give you unique insight into your inner workings, end war and cure cancer. Businesses use these tests to decide if you are a good fit for a position based on 27 metrics cooked up by a consulting firm who made a tidy profit from the deal. Individuals look to these tests to guide them in choosing a career, a mate, or a pair of shoes.
I don’t mean to sound so cynical, but I have never been surprised by the outcome of one of these tests. I have never reached the results of a personality review and said “Oh my, I didn’t know that I am a slightly introverted technology focused control freak”. Have you honestly been surprised by your test results?
On top of the obvious factor, there is this overwhelming need to label, box and shelve people as “human resources”. I am not a resource. I am not a piece of wood, a computer part or a block of steel. I am a human being, not a human resource. I don’t want to be labeled, boxed and shelved so I can be slipped into some machine as a cog to make things run just right. I want to be viewed and treated as a person who brings unique value to any position I fill. I want my singular contribution to be recognized, not because it is more important than any other contribution, but because it is different from any other.
Finally, I object to these tests because they ignore the wonderfully human factor of change. I may test as an INTJ today, but I may be an ENTP a year from now. Maybe I had a life changing experience, or maybe I just developed into a new person because I got tired of being the old person. As human beings, we can make these types of choices, but we may find ourselves stuck in pigeonholes because our pre-employment personality test tagged us as a certain “type” of person.
Realistically, these types of personality tests can help individuals who lack self awareness. They can be valuable in helping people understand where they are now, and where they may want to go, as long as the results are seen as directional arrows and not defined boundaries. In general, though, personality tests do suck. They are shallow, overused, abused and damaging. Managers would be better off investing the money in lunches with their employees than in personality testing.
