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The Debunked Test That Can Upset Your Career Options

Dr. Patricia Farrell
3 min readJan 22, 2024

One test used by corporations to sort out potential employees may be the means to pulling people off lucrative career tracks and it’s all wrong.

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

Every year, about 80 million people take personality tests. The industry is expected to grow to $6.5 billion by 2027, and 80% of Fortune 500 companies use personality tests to hire people. However, personality tests are based on the idea that traits are fixed, which can have an unfair effect on candidates.

Several companies have been charged with discrimination for using personality tests. Strengths-based leadership is a better way to build a successful team. Companies have used tests despite not knowing their limitations.

One of the most potentially harmful of these tests, and one of the most widely used in corporate America is the Myers-Briggs Test, a test that many have found flawed, inaccurate, and based on pseudoscience. How can it be that a test that is essentially useless in what it purports to do is still seen as the one to trust the most in hiring?

We could say it’s an undeserved preeminence in testing without earning it, laziness on the part of corporate HR people, poor policy, and a host of other factors. But the one factor that matters is that it shouldn’t be used, and it can ruin prospective employees' efforts to build…

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Dr. Patricia Farrell
Dr. Patricia Farrell

Written by Dr. Patricia Farrell

Dr. Farrell is a psychologist, consultant, author, and member of SAG/AFTRA, interested in flash fiction writing (http://bitly.ws/S94e) and health.

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