A potential client recently wanted me to take a personality test. Came as quite the shock… she already knew I’m a Rock Radio DJ and News Writer – professions for which it’s generally known you have to be at least a little unhinged in order to do well. This sentence alone might give away for how long I’ve been doing both of those things, but not only had I’d never been asked to submit to any such testing before, when I saw the words “Behavior Profiling” on the website for the company which administers the test, the word “WHAT?!” flew out of my mouth.
I probably run in smaller circles than I previously thought, but I can’t imagine who’d take such a test. I was educated at Byrd school in the late ’70s and early ’80s – taught boundaries and independent thinking in equal measure, with a little speech therapy thrown in (a much-belated thanks for that career-maker)…. there was no way I was going to do it. I’m pretty certain that even the teacher who shot me that death-stare after I replied “You’re kidding, right?” when she told me the Byrd library wouldn’t stock Dynamite magazine because it was “too thrashing” would have my back on this one.
Forgetting for a moment how much better a place the word would be if these litmus tests were replaced with personal interactions, I’m not going to start off any relationship – personal or professional – by answering a bunch of questions written by someone I’ll never meet designed to clue someone into aspects of my personality which they could just as easily elicit by talking with me. And if that refusal loses me the gig, I’ll wear that rejection like a tattoo.
So… and I don’t know if the current staff there wants to hear this coming from me… but thanks again, Byrd School.