On the whole, I'm not someone who fills out magazine quizzes and questionaires designed to provide glib psychological profiles. These kind of things, far from being validated job recruitment tools, are closer to horoscopes. They paint in a broad brushstrokes. Beyond confirming that you are not an axe-wielding psychopath any more than the imminent tall dark stranger, so popular with horoscope writers. Although they fall short of telling me that it is the age of Aquarius, or that Jupiter is aligned with Mars, their credibility is on a par with these astrological cliches. I don't want to labour the point, but it's a short step from here to the divination of character by ink blots, tea leaves or chicken entrails. And one could argue a case for the chicken guts because you would at least have a decent casserole at the end of the day of interviewing.
Anyway, against my better judgement, I completed one of these pieces of cappuccino psychobabble, brought to my attention by Facebook. Twenty multiple choice questions and the questionnaire would spit out a two word stereotype.
It will surprise nobody to learn that I am a "Dreamy Idealist". The report put flesh on these bones with the reassurance that this was "one of the introverted personality types".
You don't say.
In an effort to further expand the stereotype, I learned that I "prefer a quiet work environment, free from repeated distractions". So the circus clowns, wild animals and dancing girls who would normally fill my home office have to go then?
Apparently, the report goes on, I am "grateful for a certain measure of order and structure" and my "capability to concentrate is unusually great", which seems to stand at odds with my need for a quiet work environment. If my concentration is that brilliant, couldn't the dancing girls stay?
I am apparently a man of paradoxes. I need peace and solitude yet also enjoy working together with others. Come on guys -- pick one. Either I am a misanthropic loner or a happy-go-lucky team player. But then Mr Happy-Go-Lucky would not "take critique and negative feedback very personally". That response would sit more naturally with Mr Misanthropic Loner, plugging bullets into the clip of an AK-47.
It also turns out that I "enjoy the opportunity for exchanges with other people". Exchanges as in exchanges of fire perhaps? And apparently my notion of teamwork is "a few hand picked colleagues who truly move on your wavelength". This sounds less like an ideal office environment than the formula for a terrorist cell. My suspicions are further raised in line or two later when the report concludes that "It is best when you share the same high ideals and important objectives and together can fight for the same good cause". Maybe it's just me but there is something about the combination of high ideals and social misfits that makes me uneasy.
Yet amazingly, and despite the many glaring paradoxes, this is the kind of profile that companies increasingly use to try and match applicants to jobs. And for that matter, it is intended also to provide the profilee with some indication of those employment options to which they are best suited. Adrenaline fuelled, power crazed yuppies are likely to make poor librarians for instance. And so on. But it's hardly an exact science -- or science at all really. You might as well use ink blots.
Thinking of ink blots takes me back 40 years to my school and, at that time a fairly decent traditional boys boarding school education. Unfortunately, tradition still substituted for intelligent career guidance. For generations, a third of the sixth form each year had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, another third to "other" universities and the remainder were mopped up by Sandhurst. In the face of this rigid progression, careers advice at my school was predictably lamentable.
My best subjects were languages. The careers master suggested employment in the Foreign Office would be appropriate. Sensing my disinterest, he volunteered, with a note of weary resignation, that there ws always teaching. Even with my detailed psychological profile at his disposal, I doubt if he would have come up with anything more intelligent in the way of advice. In some way I had to be made to pay for decades of his own thwarted ambitions.
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