Strong in Shapes, Weak in Obedience: My Life as a Psychometric Menace

I Took a Psychometric Test and All I Got Was This Lousy Existential Dread

Today I took a psychometric test. I think it was the first one I’ve taken in about 20 years, so long ago, in fact, that the last time I did one, I’m fairly sure Tony Blair was still considered popular and dial-up internet was a viable lifestyle. Of course, I was slightly nervous, even though I don’t really believe in them. Like horoscopes with graphs. It wouldn’t have made a massive difference to things anyway, but it was interesting to go through it, in the same way it’s interesting to watch people parallel park while blindfolded.

It took about 45 minutes to complete and, naturally, the Wi-Fi dropped out in the middle. A classic test of resilience, if nothing else. But it was intelligent enough to let me pick up where I’d left off, presumably a feature they added after complaints from people who threw their laptops out of the window during the fourth consecutive ‘rotate this cube’ question. The test itself was a very odd thing. A mixture of logos being rotated (why always logos? Is there a secret league of brand consultants writing these?), primary-school maths, and verbal comprehension last seen in GCSE mocks from 1989.

It didn’t test me. I was bored within about five minutes. I started wondering what was for lunch. And that’s the problem really, people like me are not the audience for tests like that. I’m almost pathologically looking for the new, a shiny object, a curious idea, a link to an article I’ll open and never read. Once I know something doesn’t really work, I lose interest faster than a cat at a cucumber convention. And if I don’t believe in it, I simply cannot summon the will to engage. I could sooner form an emotional bond with a parking meter.

And I find that’s the same throughout my working pattern and career. Once I lose belief in what I’m doing, I lose interest and seek to move on. It’s a pattern I’ve exhibited over and over again, like a seasonal migratory bird, but one that heads for chaos and reinvention rather than the Algarve. It’s just who I am, and there’s no software update or team-building retreat that’s going to change it.

I suspect that pattern was always in me from a very young age. I was a voracious reader of books and consumer of information, until I ran out of books or the snack cupboard beckoned. Things would keep me occupied for a time, then off I’d go to the next shiny thing. It means I’ve done lots of things, genuinely interesting things, but it also means I haven’t spent 15 years becoming the world’s leading authority on, say, optimising pivot tables in Excel. I’m a neophyte, and tell you what, I’m fucking well proud of it. Why should life, which is already far too full of socks going missing and printer jams, be dominated by regularity, repetition, cycles and boredom?

It’s what makes me good in my career at being in places that need changing or need turning around, or more importantly need building or rebuilding. There’s no doubt that once I get to the point where things are BAU (Business As Usual, or Bored As Usual, depending on your corporate dialect), I start to get itchy. Not in a medical way, just spiritually allergic to stagnation. That’s when I want to FO out of there.

And I don’t think there are enough people like that. Too many people are content to keep the hamster wheel turning without ever questioning why the hamster’s still fat and the wheel’s going nowhere. Businesses allow things to go stale, because steady output is easier to manage than unpredictable brilliance. But here’s the rub, no one ever changed the world by submitting their timesheet on time. You don’t get paradigm shifts from people who reply-all to emails about fridge etiquette.

As for the test, it told me nothing I didn’t already know. Like a psychic at a seaside pier telling me I have ‘a strong personality’ and ‘a preference for breathing’. These things are systems. What you put in is what you get out. It’s like trying to find meaning in a Bake Off technical challenge, it’s not about personality, it’s about whether you’ve practised making a Genoise sponge under extreme pressure.

These tests aren’t a good basis for salaries or hiring decisions. They’re just corporate Ouija boards. “Tell us who this candidate really is, oh mighty HR spirits!” They try to box people in, when really, you could just, I don’t know, talk to them. Maybe even spend time with them. Radical, I know.

But instead, we’ve all been subjected to decades of management consultancy waffle and “best practices” that sound like they came out of a Kafka novella. The only way to keep global corporations tidy, it seems, is to flatten everyone into the same Excel spreadsheet and colour-code the cells. People aren’t individuals, they’re pivotable data.

And now, of course, the internet has removed the need for all that in-person nonsense. A business can operate globally with 12 employees and a Slack channel. Warehouses are now 70% robot, 30% bloke watching the robot while eating a Gregg’s. Eventually, Amazon warehouses will just be giant metallic pinball machines of logistics. Honestly, fair play. I work in tech, I get it. But the humans? We’ve got to work out where we fit into this without becoming glorified Roombas.

So why bother with psychometric tests? Why not just read someone’s LinkedIn, their Substack, their passive-aggressive tweets? Some companies probably do. But honestly, today’s test told me exactly what I’d have told them myself if they’d just asked. The only novelty was being reminded that, yes, I’m not 25 anymore. My speed on the number puzzles had clearly been replaced by the wisdom to not give a toss about number puzzles.

When I did the Mensa test back in the day, I revised for it like it was an exam. Because I had time, energy, and no joint pain. I passed it easily. Didn’t join, of course. I’m a firm believer in Marxism, Groucho Marxism, to be precise, I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member.

And that’s the thing, these tests are just illusions in suits. There’s a whole industry propping them up, swearing blind they’re objective, validated, scientific. But anyone who’s spent longer than five minutes thinking about systems will tell you, what you get out is what you put in. It’s all POSIWID, the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. And what these things do is give people the illusion of control. They’re no better than tarot or astrology, really. A kind of corporate cold reading. You feed it some personality-shaped sausage meat and it churns out a neatly shrink-wrapped label.

Don’t tell me it’s robust. Don’t tell me it’s deeply researched. What it spat out today was precisely what I’d have written if I’d been asked to describe myself in 200 words and promised a biscuit at the end. And I’m not a static being, I’m influenced by mood, medication, the phase of the moon and whether or not I had beans for lunch. If I’m bored, I switch off. If I’m engaged, I fly. But the test doesn’t see that. It just reflects what I wanted it to reflect.

I get why businesses use them. But that doesn’t mean they’re useful. They help with commoditising people. They make globalisation neat and tidy and standardised. They let you assign colour-coded values to the human soul. But they don’t tell you anything about someone’s ability to change the world, or even survive a Monday morning.

I did well on it though, so what am I moaning about? Tell you what though? I’d rather look at someone’s art and work out who they are, or listen to their music and work out who they are, or read their writing and work out who they are. It’s just such a shame that most people don’t want to do or try new things and that’s the real problem moving into the mid-21st century. There’s not enough people being creative, enquiring, curious and playful. They actually want regularity, repetition, no hesitation and no deviation, and I’m sorry but I haven’t a clue why.

I’ll leave you with an absolute banger from my young childhood that’s on theme.