Is Your Personality Right for Your Job?
Is Your Personality Right for Your Job?
(Bloomberg) -- https://megaphone.link/BLM3249016479
Companies have moved past trying to create a workforce with the right skills. Now they also want employees with the right personalities. It has become common for employers to put prospective workers through personality tests such as the one popularized by the Myers & Briggs Foundation. The idea is that certain characteristics lend themselves to certain types of work and that a straightforward interview can’t identify them in a job candidate as well as one of these tests.
There are a few potential problems, however, with your future boss diagnosing your personality. The tests themselves often rest on weak scientific foundations, and they can spur discriminatory patterns, providing cover for bosses to favor a certain type of person over another. Still, your personality can make a big difference at work, even if it’s hard to measure. On this week’s episode of Game Plan, Francesca and Rebecca talk to Melissa Dahl, author of Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, about how to overcome being awkward at the office and whether awkward types can get a leg up in the workplace.
To contact the authors of this story: Francesca Levy in New York at flevy6@bloomberg.net, Rebecca Greenfield in New York at rgreenfield@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Liz Smith at lsmith289@bloomberg.net.
©2017 Bloomberg L.P.