Career coaches can perhaps be forgiven for using baseless personality tests [Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, etc] to add a veneer of scientific respectability to the coaching process. But the tests enjoy wide credibility, not just among coaches, but among corporate decision makers. .. . So why is the corporate world, which we think of as so fixated on empirical, in fact quantifiable, measures of achievement like the "bottom line", so attached to these meaningless personality tests? One attraction must be that the tests lend a superficial rationality to the matching of people with jobs. ... Of course, if the function of the test is really ideological-- to promote the peg-in-hole theory of employment-- they do not have to be in any way accurate of predictors of performance of satisfaction. They serve more as underpinnings of corporate etiquette, allowing employers to rationalize rejection or dismissal in terms of an inadequate "fit". We believe that there is a unique slot for each person, the tests announce-- even though we may fail to find it in your particular case.
