Do personality tests discriminate?

When Leanne Maskell left university and began the process of applying for jobs, she recalls the terrifying moment when she was faced with sitting a slew of verbal reasoning and personality tests. As someone who is both autistic and has ADHD [but was undiagnosed at the time], she says she literally stared at her PC screen and burst into tears. “When your autistic, you’re just sitting there, trying to work out what they’re asking you,” she says. “To me none of the options around what I would do in a certain hypothetical situation made sense. They had no context. I was sitting there thinking this makes no sense.”

According to Maskell – who is now the founder of ADHD Works – which devised and now trains coaches on the first and only CPD-accredited ADHD coaching course – her situation is far from extreme. It’s estimated that just three in ten working-age autistic people are in employment, and what she and others firmly blame, is the growing use of tests that have increasingly moved away from assessing hard-and-fast competencies towards softer, characteristics and traits-based attributes, such a outlook and personality-fit. These tests, she claims, are not only inappropriate and overwhelming, but are unfair to those on the neurodivergent scale by needlessly sifting out very capable people.

“All recruitment is ultimately discriminatory – recruiters are actively trying to weed out people to get to a single candidate,” accepts Maskell. “But what’s happening with personality testing, is that certain traits that could be an asset are being screened out. People can be team members, but in a multitude of different ways.”

Personality tests are not new, and have gone through phases. Twenty years ago, ‘colours-profiling’ gained particular popularity, splitting as it did, people into ‘colours’ (red, yellow, blue or green), with associated personality traits. Reds are deemed to be orientated extraverts; greens are feelers and more relationship-orientated. Firms rushed to recruit according to the ‘colours’ they wanted in their companies.