I’m glad you had a field day with the marketing blurbs. I agree with you on the emptiness of the blurbs. However, car manufacturers promise you a Limitless Lifestyle or whatever. That doesn’t make their cars bad or good. So I’m going to skip all the marketing review stuff.
EPSO tests capabilities, not personality, it seems: Verbal reasoning, Numerical reasoning, Abstract reasoning, EU knowledge, and Digital skills.
To me this seems like a fair way to weed through the sheer number of applications they get.
You proved you are a fast learner. It makes sense that you would go through and not someone who scored a 20/100 on their final test.
My Insights profile starts with:
You will probably recognise yourself in this profile. When this is not the case, you can change or delete the phrases or components that you do not recognise yourself in according to your own insight. Before you do that, it is very advisable to check with colleagues and friends if it may be a “blind spot”.
They don’t exist in a vacuum, but to solve a problem:
The corpo personality tests exist because many people don’t understand who they are, and don’t fully understand that other people are different from them. It’s hard to work together like that, especially if leaders expect teammates to function exactly like themselves.
The school job selection tests exist because people don’t figure out who they are until they are working full time. By then if they realise their education and job selection was horribly off, it’s too late to really change that.
When you zoom out, both problems have the same cause. So it makes sense that the common solution used for problem 1 will be applied to problem 2.
Now you may hate the tests or find them useless. Fine of course. For me it gave the insight that I don’t particular enjoy certain aspects of my work, despite being good at it. It also gave me insight into why I don’t “gel” with certain people. After the first test, I was able to change my communication with those people, and our relations changed from “I don’t understand this ***hat” to teammates who cover each others weaknesses. I’ll call it “synergy”
Many of my colleagues at the time agreed that it has been a benefit to them.
So if you say that these companies aren’t allowed to claim certainty that their products have use, then I think you should extend that to yourself by not claiming with certainty that they don’t work
And I wonder what you think are better alternatives to problems 1 and 2.
There is something vastly different about selling cars and selling a scientific assessment on humans.
I do not expect a commercial product like Dodge RAM or the McRib or BigBubble Gum, to have the same marketing as a scientific assessment test or a clinic or a dentist.
There are different expectations.
The first ones will have bombastic music and grand claims, because it is a commercial product.
The other ones should retain the seriousness of their endeavor.
The tests contain personality questions included in the Verbal reasoning test. It is not called like that, but it is mostly a personality test. The Abstract reasoning one is that assessment test with the shapes and patterns which they use for IQ and such tests.
It would, if you left out the fact that the test is the same (different questions, each time, of course) for every position and every level.
E.g. even if you apply for a secretarial position, you’d be timed and judged on a very strict numerical and abstract test which are immaterial for the position you apply for.
If you apply for a programmer position you’d be tested on Verbal reasoning and EU knowledge which you won’t need in the position you apply for.
Similarly, that applies for the levels of the jobs. Low level secretary or high level administrator? Same test.
It is just an odd, useless formality.
It only tests if you can improve on the test itself, and nothing else.
I am glad to hear this and I will add this as something to reconsider
Of course.
Unlike other topics where I might go on historical tangents and facts, links, encyclopedias or stuff like that, you will notice that they are absent from here, because there are none.
Therefore this is a matter of opinion. I am just presenting how/why I came to it. Therefore there is no issue of certainty in anything I write in this case. Whoever reads all this can judge for themselves if there is anything valid and worth considering or not.
I moved this at the end, since this is where this question is located.
First of all, this implies that a company would be more keen to use those tests as part of their hiring process, since it makes practical and financial sense to test compatibility with your existing team BEFORE you hire someone, instead of after. To absolve themselves from such “light discrimination” the tests themselves claim that this is NOT how they are supposed to be used, but they are.
But let’s ignore this issue (I do not really mind it. If someone has a nasty personality, I think that it is a very valid reason to not hire them) and see the problem you presented itself:
What you are discribing is that the team members and the leader have a lack of understanding of themselves, their own personalities and on how and why people are different and this affects teamwork.
This seems like a serious issue, but it is also a very modern problem, since there were not tests like nor HR departments in the vast majority of human existence. Nevertheless we seemed to be able to collaborate just fine till then. It makes me wonder if it is not a classic case of “create the problem and then sell the solution”. Indeed there seem to be today a wide array of places where you would learn of such things even from a young age (e.g. leadership camps, sports camps, school programs for diversity and so forth), yet each time - if we trust the pros on that (whose job depends upon it) - the problem seems to be getting bigger not smaller.
To locate a different (or better) solution then we would need to first answer the question: “So, what used to happen before the HR and the tests and all those good stuff came along?”
And the answer is simple: Nothing, because the problem didn’t really exist in its current capacity. To elaborate on that:
First of all the idea of teamwork and cooperation were different.
You went to a job, you got hired, you had a foreman or supervisor, they told you what to do, you did it. People had jobs, at the time. Now everyone thinks they’ve got a “career”. It is a small, but significant swift in mentality. You didn’t need (nor expect) skilled leaders at every level, because the workers understood the assignment of being led.
Even in cases where people migrated internally to large cities, from small villages - like mine - they understood that where they were going things were going to be vastly different. They just didn’t know how different, but when deciding to move, they were in fact, deciding to adapt. When I left my village to go to the university, I had only been to large city once, when I was a kid and with my parents. Suddenly at age 18, I am plonked into a big city, alone and with the responsibility of educating myself and managing my own household. And not only me, the majority of the other students where in exactly the same position. Most of us adapted, some took the option to move to a similar department in a different city/place or even a totally different department of studies. The system provided flexibility to the people that could adapt well and to those that wanted something different (for various reasons - sometimes it was just monetary. e.g. Wanting to study in a town your family owned an apartment in).
However, there were people there who were locals to the big city.
Here is what advantages they had, that we did not: a) Their parents were with them. b) Their lived in their family house in an already functioning household. They never had to learn about bills or keeping a house clean or cooking or any other skills that come from living on your own. c) Usually they had their own vehicle/transportation, thus they could gain a lot of time within the day, which we lost in commuting via the slow public transport. d) Local connections with the university staff, administrators or even professors. e) The financial ability to pursue a more leisurly pace in their studies (since they paid no rent, nor had any overhead). Also the financial ability to pursue post-graduate degrees.
Those were their advantages in terms of studying there, however those were also disadvntages in terms of becoming adaptable adults and people that would be able to function in an environment which is beyond their comfort zone.
Look how many things they gained, but how many things were lost (the letters correspond with the list above). a) Losing agency and personal responsibility and the worry that you have noone to dig you out of your mistakes. Your parents are there, so you are not really an adult 100%. b) They never learned how to manage your finances and household. c) They never learned to commute and navigate a new, totally different place. d) They never learned to compete against others on the same ground and without having any pre-existing connection or advantage. e) They never learned to worry about the “time and money” connection and realising that life/time and money, can be limiting factors.
For sure, some of the local kids got better grades and had a much better time in university that us, the non-local kids.
They got more opportunities, better degrees, better positions. All true. But we got more XP
So, tests in life, actual tangible conditions of adaptation, are what brings you actual experience and solves this problem naturally. Without the use of HR or any tests. This is what people used to do in the past.
A second thing for your consideration is that teaching all this, is not the same. One could say “I missed out on all that, maybe there is a course?”. There isn’t. You cannot have a “course on adaptability” at any school that is as effective as actual adaptability demanded in practice. In fact having such lessons HINDERS your adaptability, instead of training it, because it is that very factor that having a tutor doesn’t help. When you have a tutor, a lot of kids get into the mindset of “weeeell, I didn’t manage this exercise, but it is ok, because the tutor will give me the answer during the lesson when he checks for our homework.” I worked as a tutor and that is exactly the most crippling mentality a student can employ, so I did my best to make them avoid it.
A third thing for your consideration - in direct connection with the second one - is the “army leadership training”. A very bizarre thing happens in the “reserve officer program”. If you view it from the outside it makes no sense and it is patently stupid. If you’ve been through it, then you understand how and why it works. Here it is:
After getting drafted, if you enroll to the “reserve officer program” the army sends you to a specialised training for being a soldier, but not an officer. In fact the training for that is much worse and rigorous than the soldier training and you are placed in a lower position than being a simple soldier. You are a cadet. Soldiers see you and smile at your misfortune. This lasts 6 months and then suddenly you are promoted to a rank just below second lieutenant (an incredible promotion of eight ranks. You go from total scrub, to outranking all the conscripts and 60% of the army) and you are given an intermediate position of power/command at some post, without any training for it. This lasts 6+6 months (6 months per post). A couple of weeks before those final months end and you are discharged, then you are ordered to attend the “leadership school” which, as I said, sounds bizarre, but it is not. What the army understands is that nothing can train you better than actual problems which you’d have to tackle and solve on your own. So, they throw you in the pit of cobras and tell you to carve a fiddle, learn music and tame the cobras, before they bite you enough times that you drop out
A normal HR idea would be to “train someone for leadership and then provide them a position of power”.
The army idea was to “train someone for serving and then providing them a position of leading people that were just like you just a moment ago” and see how you float or sink.
The leadership camp is for the total imbeciles that didn’t understand the assignment and floundered. You might be surprised, but there are usually none of those or if there are a couple, their service is ending and if they didn’t get it practically, they’ll never get it theoretically either. All the “leadership trainers” have to do for that week is come in the first day, ask us some questions, see that we made it and then laze off for the next six days.
A much better test than “standardised questions” and boxes, because each of us, got a totally different setting and problem. At the “leadership camp” there were around 40 of us. We all solved a totally different leadership puzzle and came to a totally different and unique way on “how to lead”
So, what we need for that problem you presented is less “leadership camps” and more “actual issues to tackle” from a younger age. Less helicopter parents and more “let’s do this together today and tomorrow you’ll try it on your own” parents. Less “we will now bore you to death with how you have to behave” schools and more “here is a situation, let’s see how you handle it” schools.
The HR pros are very keen on pretending that they are the next best thing since sliced bread, but the truth is that humanity solved those issues for thousands of years by just existing. It is now, in this pampered era, that we “need” those people, because young people are deprived of actual experiences. Just like muscular atrophy, mental atrophy is also an issue and with the exact similar solution: Actual exercise.
This is a matter that I’ve thought about quite a bit since we really have nothing here, in that regard. The school in places like mine is just a block of classrooms filled with chairs and desks.
No music hall, no gym, no science lab, no leisure clubs, no extra curriculum activities, nothing.
It is a place were talent is never discovered, because it is never explored.
We have managed to “produce” some extra-ordinary people (e.g. a month ago, a woman from the village won the European U21 championship in Karate, at her weight class. Quite an impressive feat), but mostly by accident or personal expenses ventures. The system itself is totally absent from the process of achieving such accomplishments.
You cannot explore every talent though and you cannot expect the system to do that consistently in small places like here, so, as it was in your question, maybe we can at least explore the “education and job selection” part and show the students what it is like to “work full time” in a wide array of jobs, learning similar practical skills in the process.
I think it is a shame that during 12 years of school noone bothered to teach us basic stuff like:
How to budget and keep simple accounting books (even though we have accountants and tax professionals aplenty)
How to provide basic first aid and what basic medical knowledge is needed in every day practice (even though we have nurses and doctors aplenty)
How to repair simple pipes and plumbing apparatus (even though we have plumbers aplenty)
How to use basic building tools and power-tools and lay some bricks and mix cement (even though we have builders aplenty)
How a basic application and contracts are made and how the basics of the state’s services work (even though we have notaries aplenty)
How to sew buttons, mend our clothes and create a small knitwork (even though we have seamsters aplenty)
and so forth… I’ve retro-actively learned a lot of the above on my own, but at an age that even if I discoved a talent or liking for them, it would be too late to pursue them.
Practical skills, real life applications, by real life people that will share not only their expertise, but also their daily experience in working that job. What is it like, what do they like about, what they dislike. That way you’d experience yourself, if something is for you or not. And even if it is not, heck at least you know how to fix your faucet and make a spiffy application.
That diversity of experience, is what will teach you (without realising that you are being taught - that way there is no resistance by the feeling that you are being patronised) that “other people are different”.
You cannot remain close-minded, in a matter in which you live through new experiences constantly. This is what will teach you practically to explore who you are and what you want. This is how you’ll slowly start to get a feel of what you “education and job selection” should look like for you.
You can sit young people in front of desks and tests and “mandatory adjustment trainings” through which they will internally yawn their socks off, for years to come. It will never amount to the positive change that even a year of practical experience would bring them. That’s my opinion and, largely, my experience and observations, while living within our society. Take all that with a grain of salt.
Thank you for making me re-think all that, in order to manage to express them coherently and write them down. It is always nice to ponder things like that.
I agree with you on the emptiness of the blurbs. However, car manufacturers promise you a Limitless Lifestyle or whatever. That doesn’t make their cars bad or good. So I’m going to skip all the marketing review stuff.
which, as I said, sounds bizarre, but it is not. What the army understands is that nothing can train you better than actual problems which you’d have to tackle and solve on your own. So, they throw you in the pit of cobras and tell you to carve a fiddle, learn music and tame the cobras, before they bite you enough times that you drop out 