Aspies For Freedom

Here is a letter someone wrote about personality testing on their blog site.  I do not know if this is a joke but I do not think I would send anyone a letter like this.  But it does seem to fit into my reality.

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None of the above
Dear Manager of Company To Which I Am Applying for a Freelance Position:

Hi there! My name's Kate and we first spoke when I applied for a freelance position you had available. We spoke again most recently when I reached the "third stage" of your "interview process", when you informed me that I was to complete a Myers-Briggs Personality-Type Indicator test. You then sent me the test, which consists of 175 questions, many of which ask things like

When you were small, did you:
a) feel sure of your parents' love and devotion to you; or
b) feel they admired and approved of some other child more than you (ie, the Olson twins)?

I understand the purpose of this test is to establish my "personality type" - it aims, by the collation of my 175 answers, to lay down some ground rules about what I am like and how I can be expected to interact with people, most importantly your existing staff, so that you can be sure of hiring the right person for the job.

That's fair enough, Mr Manager. However - and I hope I'm not thinking too far "outside the box" here - the job I applied for is freelance, up to 20 hours per week, working from home, without supervision by your staff or interaction with your customers. Now, I'm no expert in "personality mapping", but those job characteristics would indicate to me - without even having taken your personality test! - that I am, in fact, the sort of person who:

- likes working 20 hours a week or fewer
- dislikes working in an office environment
- likes working in her nightie, her dirty workout kit, or even in the altogether
- likes going days without having to shave her legs
- stares out the window for long periods for no apparent reason
- is getting really good at online Mahjongg

Yes, that's me in a nutshell, and all without having to take some silly psychometric test. Hire me today, and I'll even throw in a little "personality mapping" of my own on you and your staff! For example, even with the little information I have, I can already tell that YOU are the sort of person who:

- is incapable of making decisions on his own
- is terrified of taking responsibility
- is hoping to get lucky with his HR manager.

Yours predictably,

KE

This part -  (ie, the Olson twins)?  makes me think that its a joke.

I did the personality test on http://www.tickle.com some time ago and if I'm not mistaken they asked:

When you were small, did you:
a) feel sure of your parents' love and devotion to you; or
b) feel they admired and approved of some other child more than you

I felt quite offended by some of the questions though (and I think they were formulated by Jung originally)

tests on Tickle I did I found interesting were:

The 5-Factor IPIP Personality Test
The Ultimate Personality Test
How Bright Is Your Aura?
The Mood Swings
The Therapy Test
Subconscious Self
The Chakra Test
Right Job/Wrong Job
Tickle's Original Inkblot Test
The Super IQ Test
The Classic IQ Test

I got to know myself quite well

The flaw with these tests is that such questions are as much a reflection on the other people, i.e. if a person didn't feel their parents love and devotion, is that indicative they have some character flaw?  Or is it more indicative that maybe their parents had some character flaw that meant they didn't express their love and devotion, or maybe didn't even have any love and devotion for their child(ren)?

I could answer lots of questions like that but I think they would say a lot more about my parents than they do about me.

I think the idea of those questions is to establish the persons ability and sensitivity to reading "visual cues" in body language and communication.

There is something called "perceived rejection". When a person believes his parents (or people) are rejecting him (but they are not really!). Especially with introverts.



(This is a problem with Aspies and it is said that Aspies do follow the same characteristics as the INTJ (Introverted Judgmental) personality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger's_syndrome
(you'll find this under the heading "other characteristics" on that page)

So then what is the purpose of making people at work complete a personalty test or even at a job interview?

Anytime I had ever been asked to do one at work getting fired (or laid off officially) always seemed to follow.

Some careers (eg. call centre staff) require a certain type of personality to "survive" the nature of the job. It is useful for the employer to establish beforehand if a particular candidate is suitable for that job or not. However, it is only a guideline and also, I think many companies use those tests for the wrong purpose OR they don't know how to interpret and apply the result of those tests on the candidate as well as their own environment! It needs to be done by a Human Resourses qualified, because it involves psychology :o

This is a classic example of abusing these tests. You don't test someone and then fire them! You might be able to take things further, because the content of such a test is confidential and they have to tell you beforehand what the purpose is for testing your personality.

I'm not sure but I think it is a satire, or parody of some kind. I think it's intended  to be funny in a despairing political sort of way.

Stella

oh.. ok... am I having an "Aspie moment" by taking it up too literally... sigh

It's always difficult to be sure with American comedy on television. The audience laugh without the need for anything funny or amusing to have been said, and unless you've seen it before, you don't know the bits when you're supposed to laugh are coming.

Stella

I think probably the letter is satire, like Stella said, but she probably was writing it to express to her friends and the people who read her blog how she felt about taking the stupid personality test. Many times people write stuff on blogs to express it, and to make others laugh or be entertained. I quite like the letter for those reasons, but not as something someone should send in to the employer.

One thing aout American TV is most of it uses laugh tracks, so it's not a real audience laughing. If it is taped in front of a live audience, they have signs telling people when to laugh. I don't like being told when to laugh, it's distracting. If the show was good enough, people would laugh naturally and they wouldn't need to insert laugh tracks after the "jokes."

The only legit purpose to fire someone is incompetence or negative behaviour in the workplace. Firing someone because of their personality type result from one of these tests is unfair dismissal and can be sued for.

Well, even incompetence and bad behaviour can be very subjectively measured. One would need to know if these things could be improved by a few judicious changes eg. putting instructions in writing. I certainly agree that it is an abuse of pyschological tests to use them as a basis for firing somebody. It also goes to show that not enough thought was put into the hiring process in the first place.

There also was a character in the cartoon Garfield and Friends. From the U.S. Acre cartoons on the farm, called Wade. I don't think he was Aspie as much as he was completely paranoid. However, alot of times he said he was afraid people were saying mean stuff about him. Is that what they're getting at with "percieved rejection"?