To whom it may concern,

A couple of years ago I applied to work at Hastings (your entertainment superstore). Hastings is one of those places where they sell books, movies, CDs, video games, and various kitschy shit that no one seems to buy. I was told to apply there by my friend Adam, and so I did. Part of the application process was of the general sort: name+address, education, former jobs, references. I was fine with that. While my resume is filled with more holes than swiss cheese, I figured that Hastings wasn’t the kind of place that would look down upon me for getting my college education and not worrying about working as much.

Most of the application, however, was a big long personality assessment test. I believe it was something like fifty questions or so. And so I took it. And having never taken a personality assessment test prior to this one, I had no idea what I was in store for, and so I answered honestly, because in most tests of this sort (the Kiersey and the Jung – Myers-Briggs, for example), honesty is key in determining what kind of personality you have. I could spend another blog post just talking about these tests in general, so instead I’ll just reiterate that when I took the test, I was honest. And when I submitted it, I felt pretty good. Now, I thought, the employers will really know what kind of person I am.

A couple of days later I called Hastings for a follow up. “Hi,” I said, “I’m calling because I sent you an application…?”

“Right,” said Karey (the assistant manager). “We got it.”

“Good. So … are you still hiring or …?”

“We are,” she said, “but unfortunately you failed the test.”

“The what,” I asked.

It seemed that I had failed the personality test. At first I was confused — did this mean I had no personality? Or that my personality was not my own, but rather someone else’s? And then I realized, I was not the right personality that Hastings wanted. And that sort of bugged me. I mean, I had been honest, after all. I told them how I felt. Isn’t that, in a way, better than lying and pretending to be someone you’re not? Apparently not.

So I asked Karey what that meant, and she said,

“It means you can just take it again, and if you pass that time, we’ll interview you.”

Now I was just irritated. I had to reapply and retake that stupid test, using an hour of my time that could be better spent looking for other jobs, just so I could lie so that I could get the job. I didn’t express my irritation with Karey; instead I said thank you, hung up, and took the test again.

So now the question became: was I lying this time? I looked more carefully at the questions presented to me. “I think I am a good person” — agree or disagree. “I like being in big crowds” — agree or disagree. I do think I’m a good person, and I don’t like being in big crowds. But how should I answer? Hastings obviously would want me to think I’m a good person. If I thought I was a bad person they might be afraid that I would blow up the building or something. But what about big crowds? What was the importance of that? And what answer would get me the freaking job?

I noticed that some questions were duplicated, or rewritten, later on in the questionnaire. Why? To prove that I was a liar? What does it matter when you’re manipulating your answers just to get a job?

Either way, I redid the test, altering my answers to fit what I assumed Hastings would want to see. And I got called back for an interview. Why? At this point, you act like you know everything about me! Why would you want to talk to me when the internet did that for you? I went to the interview and did very well and I got the job. Hooray for me.

My point, if you haven’t grasped it already, is that the personality tests you force us to take on your big corporate websites are useless. No, they’re worse than useless — they’re detrimental to the hiring process. You think that by having people psychological evaluate themselves that you’ll weed out the good applicants from the bad ones. But all you’re really doing is forcing applicants to manipulate their answers to best serve you, and that will ultimately harm you. For example, I’m a pretty good guy, I work hard, I hardly ever take breaks at work, I’m friendly and kind to both customers and coworkers, and yet I failed that test, probably because I said one too many times that I prefer being alone to being in a large group. So you’re betraying the entire reason you’ve set up the system — you’re not getting to know me at all, you’re getting to know the avatar I’ve created for you.

Meanwhile there are tons of people who are terrible, arrogant, selfish pricks who do the exact same manipulation to those tests and get in because they passed. And they go on to be terrible, arrogant, selfish pricks at work. Hastings had some pricks, I’ll be honest. They had a lot of really good workers, and some people who were lazy as all hell, and some assholes. Seems normal for a job setting, doesn’t it? Well if that’s the case, why have a personality test? Why not just interview them instead?

At this point, Big Corporate Employers, I know what you’re thinking. “We have to put the test in there because there are so many applicants! We can’t judge the personalities of all those applicants ourselves!” And this may be true, but I don’t think it is. I think this is where the Hiring Manager comes in, or others like him. Obviously there is someone who must interview these people. And I also understand that even the interview process is somewhat manipulative, in roughly the same way that a first date would be manipulative; trying hard to impress someone, whether it be a boss or a potential love, tends to make people act in ways they normally wouldn’t act. But either way, the interview process is there for a reason, and it’s a much better reason than online tests. Online tests won’t look you in the eye. Online tests don’t get a feel for you based solely on the pressure of your handshake. Online tests are only programs that will filter answers through a matrix and make a decision it was programmed to make. People don’t do that.

All I’m asking, I suppose, is that it takes an hour to fill out these damn tests, and that could be an hour better spent shaking your hand and saying hello. Selling myself to you, essentially.

With that said, I have to go fill out an online personality test. Wish me luck.

Your pal,
Josh

I’m amazed at how asymmetrical illness is. People say that beauty is in symmetry, and that beautiful people are, for the most part, extremely symmetrical. It’s interesting that the opposite of beauty — malaise, illness, sickness — is depicted in asymmetrical specificity rather than all over your body. Right now I have a cold and a sore throat, and I noticed that my right nostril was plugged up while my left was not. The reasons for this are simple; if both of my nostrils were plugged up, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. But it still says something about the ugliness of disease.

Cancer starts in a specific spot. Headaches attack certain parts of the head. I suppose migraines feel like they’re all over but probably emanate from one spot. It seems like all illnesses start from specifics. On the other hand, beauty emerges as a whole, equal on both sides. The egg is symmetrical. The sperm is too. When they combine the cells divide equally into mirroring sides. Things that are one always split into two. Symmetry.

What, then, is symmetry in love? It’s a little more difficult to pinpoint the concept of symmetry in intangible things like that. A lot of people, myself included, have been deluded to believe that having similar things in common equals symmetry in love, when in practice that doesn’t seem to work out at all. In fact, the opposite idiom, “Opposites attract,” usually works out better than having the same things in common. Why is that? Why do higher concepts have a yin-yang approach to them, rather than a symmetrical approach?

Balance, in nature, is in symmetry. Physically, it would be harder for a man to walk if one of his legs were shorter than another. And most beautiful things in the world are symmetrical things. It’s a form of natural balance. But ideas like love and good and evil are dictated by a different kind of balance, where having one concept become greater than another becomes “bad,” like evil becoming greater than good. These things are to be balanced, usually by social constructs but ultimately by nature. Is this the same with love? And what balances love?

I’ve noticed that if a woman loves me too much, it turns me off. And alternately, if a woman doesn’t love me enough, it frustrates me. It follows, then, from my own personal experience, that finding a balance of love is fundamental to a good relationship. But how does that work? How does one achieve a balance of love?

The only real answers to that question come from the Beatles (“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”), which is a warmer way of explaining Christ’s fundamental belief: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Karma, essentially, though Christ didn’t exactly flesh out the karma part of it. He set out the first principle, but didn’t tack on the “if you do bad things to others, bad things will happen to you” part. It looks easy but I’ll be damned if it isn’t.

Well, my throat hurts so singing sucks right now. I wanted to record a cover of “Thinking About You” but I can’t reach the high parts without going into a really girly falsetto, and even then it still sounds shitty. So maybe I’ll just strum my guitar for a while.