Wednesday 1 May 2013

"Mumbo-jumbo" personality tests

Found this on the BBC news. An opposition politican has criticised government ministers getting jobseekers to waste time on "mumbo-jumbo" personality tests when they should be looking for work, while the Department for Work and Pensions said the questionnaire was designed to highlight things that people were good at, and reaction to it had been positive. People would be asked which of five answers - "very much like me", "like me", "neutral", "unlike me" or "very much unlike me" - best describes their view of themselves in response to a variety of different of statements.

Took me back to the "Flexible Routeway" I'd been on in 2008-09 when I'd had one, which had been on the BBC website, where I'd been described as a "Realist", one of 16 possible types, determined by 4 sub-types:
Planner / Spontaneous - where I'd been a planner as expected
Facts / Ideas - Again I expected to come out as Facts
Heads / Hearts - logical or emotional thinking, again I was the former
Introvert / Extrovert - unsurprisingly introvert.
That was actually an interesting exercise, the point being to use the "buzzwords" out of the report, such as "logical thinking" in job letters.