The Three Secrets to Acing the Startup Personality Test

You know you can do the job. But you will have to game HR’s “quantitive assessment” of “your natural gifts” to come out as an extroverted self-less team player.

You’ve passed 12 rounds of interviews, turned out (in less than 24 hours) a brilliant mock marketing plan, submitted five glowing references, and even met the CEO, who you actually got to crack the briefest of smiles. In normal times, this would be more than enough to land you a job at your dream company. There is though still one more trap to deal with in the hiring obstacle course.

There’s been a fad in recent years to give personality tests to employees at tech startups. I have friends who’ve unfortunately been subjected to and traumatized by them. As a student of corporate customs and rituals, past and present, I’m very familiar with the history of these tests. In fact, I wrote a much-beloved piece on this very subject.

I can briefly summarize the key lessons of these management tools. One, they’re worthless as a mean for discovering core personality traits. Two, they are also of zero value in predicting job performance. And finally, their real goal is in filtering out anyone who won’t make a good corporate inmate, or at least flagging those early on who might not mesh well with other widgets in the corporate machinery.

You, as a future employee of the next Apple or some other highly disruptive game-changing company, may very well have to take one of these personality…