Recently, due to an excess of time and a shortage of money, I embarked on a good, old-fashioned job hunt – only, I discovered very quickly it isn’t a good, old-fashioned job hunt anymore. The classic warm smile and confident handshake between employer and prospective employee has been forsaken in favor of long, vague and often confusing Internet “personality tests.” A human resources software company called Kronos makes one of the most popular tests.
Based on your responses (ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree) to questions such as, “You are a friendly person” and “Slow people make you impatient,” a color code is generated to indicate how well your personality fits the job: green, yellow or red. Greens are obviously best, and some companies will only look at your application if you’re a green. Yellow is in-between and may get you a call if you’re lucky. Reds simply do not get called.
Kronos boasts improved employee turnover rates and an overall increase in the quality of employees hired. They claim benefits as high as a 20 percent increase in sales and 30 percent decrease in hourly turnover. According to their website, “Rather than hiring by intuition or instinct, you can confidently select high-quality employees whom Kronos science predicts are more likely to be productive and dependable.”
Nevermind that removing subjectivity from the hiring process is impossible, and a psychologist’s interpretation of an answer is also subjective – can this test really be doing what it claims to be doing?
Consider this: If you are applying for a job you aren’t very interested in, or you have the qualities of a bad employee (laziness, bad attitude), and you encounter a 100-question exam with a time limit, what are you going to do? You are going to press the back button immediately. The questions themselves are completely irrelevant.
Besides, can the responses to these questions really paint an accurate picture of the person applying—without so much as a glance at their application, resume or faces? No. There simply is no way a person’s personality can be determined from a 50, 100 or 5,000 question multiple-choice exam. Even long established and accepted personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has its limitations–I can’t tell you how many radically different people I’ve met that are my fellow ENTPs.
Just like drug tests only combat those dumb enough to do drugs before a job interview, tests like Kronos’ only combat those dumb enough not to figure out the responses they want. If you’re especially bright, you would Google the test beforehand (easily done since you must apply from home), and find all sorts of websites that tell you how to answer! By the way, any answer that isn’t “Strongly Agree” or “Strongly Disagree” is considered wrong—they apparently only want those bullheaded types that are sure they’re right about everything.
To clarify, these tests are not simply supplemental for employers. The companies that pay Kronos for their services will literally not look at you or your application unless you do well enough on the personality test.
With many companies, such as CVS, your application isn’t even sent to the employer unless you score green. That means, if you over-think this test in the slightest, or don’t answer “strongly” enough, they have no clue who you are or that anyone is even trying to work for them. By removing the human element from the hiring process and filtering out those who answer too honestly, they are losing out on some very valuable employees.
The company’s name seems fitting, doesn’t it? In Greek mythology, Kronos was a Titan who castrated his father to take over as ruler of the world, and later ate his own children to escape the same fate. These automated, impersonal Internet questionnaires have taken over the country’s jobs for now. Yet, just as Kronos the Titan was eventually defeated by Zeus despite his attempts to eliminate threats, so shall Kronos the company be defeated by us, the good employees who work at companies run by people—not robots.
Sam Arnold is a junior majoring in philosophy.
