oggbashan
Dying Truth seeker
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2002
- Posts
- 56,017
Some years ago, I took on a major writing project for an international management consultancy. About halfway through the project, the director of psychological services asked if I would do the bank of tests that they used to assess potential new recruits to the consultancy. Hell, why not?
The tests took several hours and, the following day, the psych services woman met me for a debrief. She began by stressing that there is really no such thing as normal or correct. And then she said: 'But I have to say that you are certainly different.'
Personally, I thought that it was 'the others' who were different.
Decades ago my job was being made redundant. To avoid paying me redundancy I had to be considered for any other suitable vacancies in the large organisation. Every vacancy ran the same series of tests, and no, you couldn't carry forward the last result even if it was yesterday. I scored maxima.
They didn't want to appoint me to any of the vacancies. Basically they were scared stiff. There were three managers interviewing me. I had scored higher than the added sums of ALL their test results. As a person working for them, my scores suggested they should be my juniors.
But they thought the psychometric tests would save their embarrassment.
My result in summary: A fiercely independent individual who would challenge any flawed decision, not back down until the decision is changed and to make it worse - almost every time his challenge would correct. Tester's comment after seeing my scores on the other tests: "Probably delete the word 'almost'."
They all rejected me for 'not being a team player'.
But it was all nonsense. Why?
In my previous employment part of my duties had been to choose testing methods for recruitment. I had reviewed almost all the available tests, including the ones I was repeatedly sitting, and knew exactly how they worked and for many of them knew the questions and ANSWERS.
The tests weren't testing my ability as a manager. They were testing my memory and my competence as an assessor of tests. I was overqualified as a test subject.
But I still scared them stiff and ended up unemployed.
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