Service Jobs Now Require Bizarre Personality Test From AI Company (404media.co) 128
An anonymous reader shares a report: Applying to some of the most common customer and food service jobs in the country now requires a long and bizarre personality quiz featuring blue humanoid aliens, which tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of "agreeableness" and "emotional stability." If you've applied to a job at FedEx, McDonald's, or Darden Restaurants (the company that operates multiple chains including Olive Garden) you might have already encountered this quiz, as all these companies and others are clients of Paradox.ai, the company which runs the test and helps them with other recruiting tasks.
Judging by the reaction on Reddit, where Paradox.ai's personality quiz has gone viral a couple of times in recent weeks and bewildered many users, most people are not familiar with the process. Personality quizzes as part of an application for hourly work isn't new, but the Paradox.ai test has gone repeatedly viral in recent weeks presumably because of the bizarre scenarios it presents applicants with and the blue humanoid alien thing. Other clients included on Paradox's website include CVS, GM, Nestle, 3M, and Unilever.
Judging by the reaction on Reddit, where Paradox.ai's personality quiz has gone viral a couple of times in recent weeks and bewildered many users, most people are not familiar with the process. Personality quizzes as part of an application for hourly work isn't new, but the Paradox.ai test has gone repeatedly viral in recent weeks presumably because of the bizarre scenarios it presents applicants with and the blue humanoid alien thing. Other clients included on Paradox's website include CVS, GM, Nestle, 3M, and Unilever.
If you like that (Score:2)
If you like this you'll love LinkedIn Memes For Go Getter Teens [facebook.com]
Faceboot isn't good for much, but you can still farm memes there
The fact that they can do this crap (Score:5, Interesting)
shows you that the job market sucks all around. Either that or they're using this to filter out people they don't want to hire for less than legal reasons (read: old people and minorities).
Re:The fact that they can do this crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, these days there seem to be a lot of people who think a job is something where they send you a paycheck, and you just do whatever you want.
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That might be true, but this hiring chat bot isn't going to spot those who don't want to work. So your point is a bit off topic I feel.
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I can see that being a possibility.
There's been plenty of evidence of existing societal bias being baked into these "AI" systems and their training data.
Re: The fact that they can do this crap (Score:2)
Yeh, but weâ(TM)re talking about service industry jobs, thatâ(TM)s jobs where the manager thinks that you do a bunch of work and then they *donâ(TM)t* send you a paycheck.
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Re: The fact that they can do this crap (Score:2)
A job is where they send you a paycheck and get to do whatever they want to you. Anytime labor tries to upset the status quo it is time to scream communists.
I know right? (Score:2)
For the record, my kid put so many hours in at their job they ended up in the ER. Americans now work more hours than the ****ing Japanese [cliffsnotes.com]
Christ, and people wonder where "ok boomer" and the "boomer remover" memes came from...
Re:The fact that they can do this crap (Score:5, Funny)
Meh, New New Deal (Score:2)
When that happens the kids will start to fix the mess we left them, and that means a New New Deal.
you see why unions are needed! (Score:4, Informative)
you see why unions are needed!
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lol (Score:2, Informative)
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you see why unions are needed!
Are there unions for potential employees being interviewed?
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unions at the work place can make the hiring process better at the shop
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unions at the work place can make the hiring process better at the shop
Ah, that makes more sense. I support unionizing but none of my software engineering jobs have ever been close to a union.
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People in a union are people that have already been hired, so by definition, they have already passed the hiring personality test.
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Re:you see why unions are needed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Unions won't save you.
Place I know has implemented something similar to this, and is a union shop. This isn't even coming direct supervisors (who coach applicants how to answer currently) but way further up the food chain.
This is more the complete disconnect from the professional managerial class and front line staff. I don't think even labor law will help.
Just a case of those who advocated for this to be demoted and/or fired.
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I'm not sure making people harder to fire will encourage easier-going hiring practices.
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There's a real difference between silly and difficult.
just wait for some ADA lawsuit to happen and the d (Score:5, Interesting)
just wait for some ADA lawsuit to happen and the discovery may be very damming.
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I guess I've been fortunate enough to convey from my own personal interactions to say that those who qualify for ADA protections can be some of the nicest and most agreeable people you'll ever meet and interact with.
On top of that..fuck, have you talked to the (alleged) non-disabled people lately? Makes you wonder why the insane asylums went.
Running the humiliation gauntlet (Score:5, Insightful)
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The rest of us just need to lie about having 20 years of experience in a technology that has been out for only 3.
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These personality tests are a legal form of public humiliation designed to weed out less desperate and independent candidates not willing to put up with the on-the-job corporate abuse.
Precisely what my thought was. HR departments have become experts at humiliating would-be employees during the hiring process just to make sure they fit the "corporate culture" of taking whatever abuse they feel like dishing over the course of your employment. This seems like a logical next step from what I remember. I suppose we can look forward to these being added to our yearly required "training" rituals soon.
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These personality tests are a legal form of public humiliation designed to weed out less desperate and independent candidates not willing to put up with the on-the-job corporate abuse.
Nobody wants to work!
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These personality tests are a legal form of public humiliation designed to weed out less desperate and independent candidates not willing to put up with the on-the-job corporate abuse.
I find it very weird how so many American MBAs put so much stock in disproved pseudo-science, notably Meyer-Briggs Type Indicators. The only time I've ever done MBTI tests was for an American company (job was UK based, parent was American) and I'm pretty sure if it actually told us anything of use, people would quickly learn how to game it to get the result they want.
If you find turnover in your company is particularly high, it's usually a problem with the company and not the employees. Doubly so if all
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a lost nursing home patient serving as the President
Reagan is back from the dead? Maybe a game show host, wait we tried that already.
Pick me! Pick me! (Score:3)
Ooh! Ooh! I have a bizarre personality. Where do I sign up?
Re: Pick me! Pick me! (Score:2)
Bizarre personality disorders are directed to the trigger-happy swat team that's always going in first into drug and anti-terrorist raids. Aka cannon fodder.
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Bizarre personality disorders are directed to the trigger-happy swat team that's always going in first into drug and anti-terrorist raids.
And sit outside for an hour-and-a-half while there's an active shooter in an elementary school.
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The tests are very simple (Score:2)
If you don't tell to to stick their ridiculous test where the sun doesn't shine, you have little enough spine and enough of a doormat to be acceptable.
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Worth f**ing around and finding out!
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Well, you have nothing to lose but your chains... I mean, a minimum wage job where you're constantly yelled at by customers and ripped off by management.
A test for human to human interaction (Score:5, Funny)
Run by a chat bot in a sterile situation. Yay.
opens the door to ssn / bank info scams (Score:2, Interesting)
opens the door to ssn / bank info scams.
Does Paradox.ai have any rules to not allow any real job to ask for info like that with the chat bot?
As you don't want scammers to post fake jobs with some AI bot that say your hired and I can help you setup your bank and tax info to get you started right away to get mixed up with an real job that thinks that HR bot can make it so that staff does not need to deal with it.
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same company’s chatbot HR system does that part and it can look like some scam
https://www.reddit.com/r/recru... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkO... [reddit.com]
Personality Test (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Personality Test (Score:5, Insightful)
Certain jobs require certain personalities.
That's what an interview process is for. Personality tests are garbage - some people just LOVE Myers-Briggs, but it's complete hokum.
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I've worked a few McJobs, the answer "put my own $2 in the register" is not the answer they are looking for. Count the drawer again and notify the manager is always the correct answer because while it isn't a lot of money it's more important to recognize when you have an issue (I.E. do we have someone who can't count working the register? Do we need to offer additional training on how to do returns or void sales? Do we have a theft problem?).
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A: Take $18 and leave a note.
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some people just LOVE Myers-Briggs, but it's complete hokum.
Why?
(Expecting the standard handwaving of having heard something-something about statistics without having looked into any of that directly.)
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Here's one example [vox.com]
You are asking me to prove a negative, but the onus is on you to prove a positive. Why is Myers-Briggs not garbage? Show your evidence that it has legitimate analytical value.
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Show your evidence that it has legitimate analytical value.
Sure. Here's an analysis of how it fails correlating with Big Five and how it's measuring "something" that Big Five doesn't deal with. That something is consistent. And there's a remarkable lack of studies of what that is, which is precisely the problem:
* Furnham, A. (2022) The Big Five Facets and the MBTI: The Relationship between the 30 NEO-PI(R) Facets and the Four Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Scores. Psychology, 13, 1504-1516. doi: 10.4236/psych.2022.1310095 [doi.org].
Psychologists not studying something "b
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Sure, totally agree, and mbti is totally useless for that. Just as how finding out if you
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Wikipedia says it best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]–Briggs_Type_Indicator
"The test relies on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.[5] As a psychometric indicator, the test exhibits significant deficiencies, including poor validity, poor reliability, measuring 'dichotomous' categories that are not actually independent, and not being comprehensive."
You might as well
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The test relies on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants (...)
That's a good denouncing of the test applied by the company. Is that a problem with the testing procedure, being as it is profit-motivated? With the baseline Jungian model it's based upon? With both? For instance, I haven't seen any study of how things fare when one ignores the four MBTI letters that try to wrap the eight Jungian cognitive functions into an easy-to-sell package, and go deal with those directly.
Re: Personality Test (Score:2)
It's a trap I fell for when I was younger and that my parents often fell into, especially if the salesman had impressive letters behind their name or a fringe academic on their side. The thing is though, the claims never really panned out. It wasn't until I started learning more about critical thinking and skepticism that I unde
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Those are good points, but what strikes me as utterly silly in what most every critic of the model say is that they threat the four letters as four axes and go from there.
They aren't. The Jungian model doesn't say, for example, that Extroversion and Introversion are one axis. It says there are four extroverted functions, and four introverted functions. Each extroverted function forms three axes: one with its introverted version, another with its opposite function in its extroverted version, and another with
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there are MOUNTAINS of studies showing the inaccuracies.
That's where I take issue with the criticisms. Whenever I read a detailed paper criticizing Juntian typology in general, and MBTI in particular, especially when they're compared with the Big Five, I'm always surprised by how much the critics understand the later but not the former. I don't mean agreeing with the former, I mean merely understanding. For example, this paper [doi.org] is one the most detailed criticisms I found, and while it argues very well, it strikes me a categorical set of misunderstandings of every
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Certain jobs require certain personalities.
That's what an interview process is for. Personality tests are garbage
There's no way an interview can accurately assess someone's personality beyond the most superficial aspects, and even there it's not hard to put on a show if you know what's desired.
I don't know if personality tests do any better, but interviews definitely can't do it.
This is an area where those hiring unskilled labor have a really tough time. If you're hiring for a white-collar position that requires a degree you can depend on the education process to have selected for certain important personality tr
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The question is do these tests work as advertised?
I had to go through this. Failed it numerous times, and had a manager guide me through the testing because my references were exemplar. Who are you going to believe?
I was the highest paid employee for that position and made up 1/3 of payroll with all the bonuses I got.
That's the kind of person these tests are weeding out.
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As I posted elsewhere, these tests are just bullshit.
However, that doesn't mean they can't work in some contexts. Suppose Alice and Bob don't work well together. Their boss makes them take Myers Briggs, which classifies Alices as ENTJ and Bob as ISFP. Now there is no such thing as an "ENTJ" or an "ISFP"; the only dimension that has any scientific support is the first letter. But sitting Bob and Alice down to work out their differences in work style with some value-neutral framework making it a little less
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You have an incredibly creative way of saying Disney employees do need stronger personality tests.
I get it (Score:2)
Good luck on those lawsuits (and good luck hiring any talented programmers but that's not really service jobs)
It's dumb, and it's been going on forever. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Back in the 90s I worked for an organization that, although they didn't *hire* based on personality tests, was really enthusiastic about using them as a management tool, e.g. figuring out why employee A didn't work well with employee B, or why employee C was unhappy at his job. So I did what any good nerd would do and I looked up the research literature supporting these things, and in a nutshell they're not supported by evidence. Most of them are pure bullshit dreamed up by some business consultant that no
What's new is seeing it for McJobs (Score:2)
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Saying "it's dumber" is probably wrong. I suspect that their goals are not the goals they claim to have, and whenever a restriction gets put on, they need to come up with a new way to achieve their actual goals.
(I'm not claiming that this is an effective way to achieve whatever their goals are, but I suspect that both:
1) The don't admit their actual goals, usually even to themselves.
and
2) They've go no real idea of an effective method to achieve those goals.
So they buy into these approaches, which
It's an IQ test (Score:5, Insightful)
How have they not been sued for racism? (Score:3)
I thought no such tests could be given in the US because if the result is disproportionate demographics then it is considered defacto racism.
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Test management (Score:3)
Is this AI or Wonderlic? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wonderlic test [wikipedia.org] had been used by the NFL for decades before being discontinued a few years ago. Its usage was stopped because the correlation between test predictions and actual success was weak. In fact, for some football positions, the correlation was negative.
knowing waiting staff (Score:2)
they probably want a tip just to fill out the questionnaire
Honesty Trap (Score:4, Interesting)
Usually these just filter out the people who are dumb or crazy enough to not know how to lie properly, which I guess is the point.
I can imagine one of the questions will be about why you flipped a tortoise on its back and are just watching it struggle as it bakes in the hot sun.
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What's a tortoise? (/h just in case)
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Do you know what a turtle is?
misunderstood the question (Score:2)
wait, wut?
Hot take (Score:3)
....this is justified.
Given that pretty nearly all the under30s I know are borderline neurotics over one (or more) issues they feel are world-ending apocalypses, I think businesses are justified deploying SOME sort of filter that allows them to simply weed out the blue-haired-non-binary-loli-furry with 200 piercings, a tattoo of a giant cock on their forehead, that wants to wear a buttplug tail at work, cries all the time, and will claim that being told to do the fucking job amounts to "violence".
Because saying "we're not hiring you, you're psycho" gets you sued.
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Furries turn you on and you can't stop thinking about them?
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Fully agree. Obviously I was being hyperbolic. We just hired a great young man in his 20s that will absolutely be a great addition. We bounce excel ideas off each other and both learn in the exchange.
My point, of course, was about the catastrophic clade of unemployables.
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....this is justified.
Given that pretty nearly all the under30s I know are borderline neurotics.
This really says a lot more about you than young people.
If everyone around you is a "borderline neurotic"... It's probably you that has the problem.
The worst thing I've had to explain to a Millennial (fresh out of uni) was taxation. I did this by asking him to give me a £20 note and giving him £15 back. I put a fiver into the house fund, no need to teach taxation and corruption on the same day.
An excerpt of the latest test. (Score:5, Funny)
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
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Why is that?
Turtle won't let me.
Explain that you are a victim of bad circumstance, just like the turtle. It also prevents some wannabe 'psychoanalyzing' assumed tendencies of apathy/cowardice and violence.
Better use for it (Score:2)
You should be made to pass this test to get on an airplane.
Such tests have been around for ages. (Score:3)
I remember having to fill in a 3-page multiple choice questionnaire for a job 30 years ago. (I failed, and was not hired!)
The fact that it's graded by an AI rather than a human...doesn't change much IMHO.
Interaction is low (Score:2)
I hope those AI features don't end up affecting the price of the service. What a waste of money. AI here is an answer without a problem.
So they want drones (Score:3)
that wont fight for their rights and just toe the party line... Test weeds out those that might ask questions when employer starts to exploit them.
Personality test ... (Score:2)
Hare test (Score:2)
probably will spew sh$t like (Score:2)
"Would you date a Nigerian prince?"
"Have you ever dressed like Taylor Swift at work?"
"Can cats play the piano?"
"Do you know how to free a chubby customer from a jammed toilet?"
"Do you have any children who heavily resemble Elon Musk?"
"What percent of Asian kids could do your job?"
"Does your local pizza parlor have a message basement?"
"Has a supernova ever killed anybody you know?"
"Would you hire somebody with 13 fingers?"
"Have you ever stared at a solar eclipse and liked it?"
"Have you ever had sex with offi
Know your customer (Score:2)
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This is about getting people into their most effective role.
Nope. This is about getting glorified meatbags that will take any abuse given to them into positions they can't replace fully with machines and AI, yet. While also getting rid of those meatbags that could be a problem for the owner class when the replacements are finally good enough. Companies aren't doing this for the "betterment of society" or any such enlightenment bullshit. They are beholden to nothing but their own profits and greed. (Because society lets them get away with it.) Stop trying to steelma