Aspies For Freedom

There's one real trick to these bogus personality tests: lie.  

Does it suck?  Yeah.  Is it dishonest, thus totally defeating the supposed purpose of the test?  Yeah.  Is it one of the only ways to get past such a ridiculous hurdle?  Probably.  My mom, whose old managerial job at a large national store chain included HR duties, has told me that in some ways the personality tests don't test personality; they test whether someone knows better than to do what they actually believe in the workplace rather than doing what their employer wants them to do.  

In other words, I may believe that being five minutes tardy isn't a big deal, because at most jobs, it simply isn't.  But if I'm dumb enough to say what I believe rather than saying that I think tardiness is a major workplace problem that seriously affects productivity, they don't want to hire me.  They want to know that I know how the game is played.  

Employers generally don't want people who think for themselves; they want people they can manipulate into following idiotic company policies without asking too many questions.  They want people whose creativity and free-thinking is confined to very narrow situations, who will do what they're told.

I think someone else mentioned that there are books that will teach you to do this, and that's true.  There are also books describing how to write resumes and how to interview well, and these have similar information.

What you want to determine is what the employer wants.  Generally they want someone they view as "stable" (that's why you get questions about how happy you are with your life), a "team player" who can sometimes work unsupervised, someone who goes along with the "ethical" views that benefit their company (questions about whether you'd rat out a fellow employee/friend you feel might be stealing are along those lines), and who handles workplace conflict in a manner that requires the least effort and intervention from them (they don't want someone who reports every minor annoyance to management, someone who engages in workplace gossip and politics, or someone who ignores potentially large problems until they blow up in the end).

So in my experience, you need to go into it with three things in mind:

1.  What does the employer want in an ideal employee?  (see above)
2.  Which of these expectations are realistic?  (they know people aren't perfect; not everyone is deliriously happy with his or her life)
3.  Which job expectations based on these can I absolutely not fake for the purpose of my job?  (For instance, if you aren't comfortable discussing conflict with co-workers, but know you can do it if necessary, you want to indicate that you don't have a problem with doing so.  If doing so would send you into panic attacks, however, it's better to just tell the truth, because those will give you away later if you're put in that position.)

If you know you are capable of doing a job well, someone else's interpretation of your personality from a dubious test shouldn't have to keep you from that opportunity, or from even getting to an interview.  Unfortunately, since they've taken all the humanity out of the hiring process and streamlined it to involve the least amount of HR personnel effort possible, getting hired is often a matter of stupid little things that have nothing to do with your ability to do a job, like solving the personality test puzzle or sending a thank-you note after an interview.

I would doubt that most personality tests indicate autism, because the training for those who read the results for those and report them to the companies is frequently very brief and not very in-depth.  More likely the questions are assigned to a point system, or you get scores in certain categories like "ethics" and "communication", and if you score poorly in these, they don't care if it's because you're autistic or because you're an NT person having a bad test day, they're still not going to hire you.

I don't think I said being a team player has anything to do with working without supervision; they're two different aspects of what employers want.  Being a "team player" means someone who is willing to work with other people, regardless of differences.  I may not get along with my co-workers -- frankly, I find some of them extremely annoying, and I certainly don't fit in with all of them -- but I can work with them anyway, because my opinion is irrelevant in that case.

In the real world, the hiring process is incredibly discriminatory over everything from gender to height to speech tone to the ability to apply one's makeup well, no matter what anyone says.  You can demand that people change, sit there jobless for a long time, and watch as things stay the same, or you can adapt enough to get hired and prove to them that people on the autistic spectrum can be extremely valuable, capable workers.  Your choice.  It's just that I prefer the latter approach, even if it's not always the easiest thing in the world.  Employers will always prefer the job candidate who focuses more on what he or she can do than what he or she cannot.  Why not be known as the person who's really great at X, Y, and Z, and oh yeah, just happens to have autism, rather than being the autistic who, if anyone ever gave her a chance, could do those things?  I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, while being an aspie is a big part of who I am, it isn't everything I am, all-inclusive under one heading.

And my mother, who is disabled, and who has one daughter with MS and another with Asperger's, was always an extremely fair supervisor, especially with regards to hiring and employee reviews (which at her company affect people's raises).  Not everyone is a prejudiced jerk.  Her peers unfortunately did not approve of her equanimity as much as the people who worked under her did, which is why she switched to a different department eventually.

Well said!