Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

by Cathy O'Neil

Personality tests ranked low on the scale—they were only one-third as predictive as cognitive exams, and a...

This is particularly galling because certain personality tests, research shows, can actually help employee...

They can also be used for team building and for enhanc...

After all, they create a situation in which people think explicitly about...

That intention alone might end up creating a better wo...

In other words, if we define the goal as a happier worker, personality tests might en...

But instead they’re being used as a filter to wee...

“The primary purpose of the test,” said Roland Behm, “is not to find the best employee. It’s to exclude as many people as...

You might think that personality tests would ...

If you go online to take a Five Factor Personality Test, it ...

One question asks: “Have frequent mood swings?” It would probably be smart to a...

Another asks: “Get mad easily?” Aga...

Not too many companies want to hi...

many of the tests used today force applicants to make difficult choices, likely leaving them with a sinking feeling of “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”

Answering “unique,” said Chamorro-Premuzic, captures “high self concept, openness and narcissism,” while “orderly” expresses conscientiousness and self control.

If you go to a kindergarten class in much of the country, for example, you’ll often hear teachers emphasize to the children that they’re unique.

It’s an attempt to boost their self-esteem and, of course, it’s true.

Yet twelve years later, when that student chooses “unique” on a personality test while applying for a minimum-wage job, the program might read the answer as a red flag: ...

Basketball teams are managing individuals, each one potentially worth millions of dollars.

Their analytics engines are crucial to their competitive advantage, and they are hungry for data.

The companies hiring minimum-wage workers, by contrast, a...

They slash expenses by replacing human resources professionals with machines, and those machines filter large populat...

Unless something goes haywire in the workforce—an outbreak of kleptomania, say, or plummeting productivity—the company has little...

It’s doing its job—even if it misses out on p...

The company may be satisfied with the status quo, but the victims of its au...

And as you might expect, I consider personality tests in hiring de...

The majority of job applicants, thankfully, are not blackballed by automatic systems.

But they still face the challenge of moving their application to the top of the pile and landing an interview.

This has long been a problem for racial and ethnic minorities...

In 2001 and 2002, before the expansion of automatic résumé readers, researchers from the University of Chicago and MIT sent out five thousand phony résumés for job openings advert...

The jobs ranged from clerical work to customer service and sales. Each of the résu...

Half featured typically white names like Emily Walsh and Brendan Baker, while the others with similar qualifications carried names like Lakisha Washington and Jama...

The researchers found that the white names got 50 percent more callback...

The white applicants with strong résumés got much more attention than wh...

when it came to white applicants, it seemed, the hiring managers w...

But among blacks, the stronger résumés barely ma...

The ideal way to circumvent such prejudice is to consider ...

Orchestras, which had long been dominated by men, famously started in the 1970s to hold auditions with the ...

Connections and reputations suddenly counted for nothing. Nor did the musicia...

The music from behind the sheet spok...

Since then, the percentage of women playing in major orchestras has leapt by a factor of five—though they still make u...

The trouble is that few professions can engineer such an even-handed tryo...

Musicians behind the sheet can actually perform the job they’re applying for, whether it’s a Dvorak cello co...

In other professions, employers have to hunt through résumés, looking for qualities t...

As you might expect, human resources departments rely on automatic systems to winn...

In fact, some 72 percent of résumés are never see...

Computer programs flip through them, pulling out the skills and experiences that the...

Then they score each résumé as a match for t...

It’s up to the people in the human resources department to decide where the cutoff is, but the more candidates they can eliminate with this first screening, the fewer human-hours ...

So job applicants must craft their résumés with that automa...