My Personality Tests Keep Coming Back Negative

I have lost count of the number of jobs I have applied for since October. I could go back through the wee notebook I’ve been keeping and count them all (after the sheet the dole office gave me was filled up in about a week) but I’m not really inclined to. I have come across every way of applying for positions you can think of. I have emailed CVs, handed CVs in to actual people, done online and paper applications, even just chatted to a charming pub landlady by means of applying for a bar job. I could write a detailed analysis of the process of applying for jobs, and if anyone feels like employing me to do such a thing I will certainly oblige.

One things I have noticed is the increased use of ‘personality tests’ when applying for jobs online. So far I’ve only come across them when applying for jobs in the financial sector, but these things have a tendency of spreading like bird flu so it probably won’t be long before McDonalds want to know if you’re a fire type or a water type and family run solicitors are making you do those inkblot tests.

They’re clearly based on some pseudo-scientific bullshit. They ask you to describe yourself in ways which are just, frankly, odd. You have to click on statements on a computer screen and, usually, rank them in some sort of order. The statements used are usually sweeping and either complete common sense (I am a good worker) or make no sense at all (I would rather write a letter with crayon than eat soup with a fork). This is clearly to stop people sussing them out and just lying to try and get the job. Usually they group qualities together in such a way that it’s impossible to work out which one they value the most highly. Are you organised or motivated? Er, can’t I be both? There’s some algorithm at work there that I just can’t crack.

It also must be a pretty flimsy way of getting to know someone. Selecting from a pre-thought up list of qualities must be extremely limiting. It also offers no opportunity for explanation, but you have to get through this crap to be able to properly talk about yourself. You don’t even get to fill out an online application before you go through this lot. Some computer sits there and appears to randomly allocate you a personality and, if you are deemed worthy, you can talk to an actual person and this actual person can see if you’re actually going to be any good at the actual job.

They also don’t work. By that I mean they can’t tell who is going to be good at a job and who isn’t. I know this for a fact because I used to work for a building society. I applied through their website and failed their personality test. A few months later I was offered an interview through an agency and, because once I was looking at a real person and could explain my skills and relevant previous experience they decided I might be able to do the job, I was offered it. I then went on not just to work in the customer service role I’d applied online for but to specialise in ISAs and Bonds which are considerably more complicated. The digital personality test didn’t know anything about me, let alone how shit hot I was when it came to advising people on tax free savings.

So they’re demoralising, confusing, infuriating and they don’t work, so why keep using them? Simple, despite what IDS says about there being thousands of jobs vacancies there just aren’t. There are, however, thousands of job seekers so putting some daft cyber roadblock to eliminate most of them in the early stages probably saves a lot of time for companies. It’s a pretty shitty way to treat people though. Yes, if there are eight thousand people applying for twenty vacancies you’re works cut out for you but at least have the common decency for it to be a person who turns you down, not some low-rate psychobabble squit of software. This is why everyone I know is emigrating to Australia*.

I would absolutely love it if these things disappeared. I'd love it even more if the irritating ones people keep putting up on Facebook disappeared as well. No, I don't care which Scrubs cast member I am (it's always Dr Cox, by the way) and if you need to build up a picture of yourself using a test someone else wrote to kill time you have bigger problems than I can fix.

I can haz job now plz? Kthnxbai

*True story.

Workfare and the Loss of Self

Workfare is a terrible, inhumane policy thought up by a government that specialises in terrible, inhumane policies. As I’ve said before it is a truly awful time to be unfortunate and vulnerable enough to rely on the state. Not only are the benefits that allow you to survive being seriously eroded but you are treated like lying, cheating scum. Workfare is one such manifestation of this. And then there’s the ridiculous (I’d laugh if I could stop gnashing my teeth in anger) situation the government now finds itself in of Workfare having been declared illegal, but they’re going to retro-actively change the law.

Let’s have a quick re-cap of the case against Workfare.

If you are on the dole for nine months they can pack you off to a work programme. This may or may not involve you working for a company for free. They will tell you that you are doing it in exchange for benefits, but the companies are getting free (or slave) labour. Often you will be doing a job for free next to someone who gets paid for it. Imagine how that much feel for both of you. The unemployed person is being told they’re not worth the same as someone else doing exactly the same thing, and the employed person is being told their job is so worthless they can get someone else to do it for free. You may be told its work experience. It won’t be. They won’t listen to you and place you somewhere worthwhile or that may help you with your long time career aspirations and goals. They will place you with someone who has a cosy little partnership with the DWP. It also is taking jobs away from your fellow job seekers. Why would a company hire someone and pay them when the dole bunnies will do it for free? Many promises of permanent, paid employment at the end of the placement are just guff.

So, Workfare is damaging and dehumanising. Companies and the DWP are exploiting vulnerable people. What could make this worse? How about if charities were doing it? Yes, charities are using people on Workfare placements. The very organisations that claim to be helping the vulnerable in society are taking advantage of those same people, and, just because someone is a volunteer, don’t think they can’t be undermined. The message is clear; why would you want to do this because you think it is right? These fools are being forced into it. They could also, once again, be taking away hours that people rely on for social contact or to keep themselves busy in retirement or work towards a career in a specific field. I expect private companies to be prepared to do anything to make a buck, but charities? I honestly expected better.

There’s been calls for boycotts of companies using Workfare, and charities have been no exception. Frankly I think any organisation that takes advantage of people in such a way should be stripped of their charitable status. But much of this I already thought before. Then I came across this piece by Sarah Ditum expressing her regret that the Salvation Army, a charity close to her heart, were using Workfare.

I was disappointed as well. The Salvation Army are a charity that work with the poorest and most desperate people in society. I can imagine few poorer or more desperate than those on the dole, especially those who have been on the dole for so long they’ve been shipped off to a Workfare programme. It sounds like a sick joke. Ditum notes that the YMCA have similarly let the side down.

Then she made a very interesting point, and one I hadn’t considered before. The Salvation Army are an overtly religious charity. What happens when someone who, for example, is a hard line atheist and disagrees with any kind of organised religion, is asked to work for them for free? This could go for a number of charities. Suspicious of Oxfam’s practices in the UK and abroad? Tough. Can’t stand Help for Heroes rhetoric or over-simplification of complex issues? Don’t care. Disagree with the NSPCC’s  emotional blackmail in their adverts? None of our concern.

Of course, this could go for private companies as well. Someone who holds deep anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation beliefs would be loathed to be forced to work for Walmart partner, ASDA. Would an anti-sweathshop campaigner feel comfortable working in Primark? The examples can go into the thousands. No company is perfect and no charity has a cause that everyone can get behind.

Resistance, however, is pointless. Refuse and they will stop your benefits. Not only have they taken your freedom and dignity by forcing you to work for free but they’ve taken away your right as a human being to express your thoughts and views. The DWP is successfully dehumanising the unemployed, and this, although an issue burning for a long time, is just another reason to boycott Workfare.

Alec Shelbrooke; Remove Head From Sphincter, Then Suggest Policy

If you’ve been paying attention to our almighty Tory led government over the last couple of years you will no doubt have become aware that everyone on benefits is a lazy, cheating lay about who deserves nothing. As soon as they can find a way to placate those miss-guided liberals who maintain that people who rely on the welfare state have rights like anyone else, these spongers will be taken behind the chemical sheds and shot.

Well, it’s OK if that had slipped your notice because Alec Shelbrooke, MP for Elmet and Rothwell (depressingly near to me) has given us a reminder with a suggestion for a flagship policy in this hateful agenda. According to Shelbrooke people on certain benefits will be given their money on credit cards that prevent them from buying anything the government doesn’t think they should.

You’ve probably guessed where this is going. The two ‘big baddies’ of wasted welfare are mentioned. No fags and no booze for you naughty dole bunnies. You’re not allowed to gamble either. Or use ‘paid for TV channels’ (so…as I can’t find anything telling me specifically what that means, I’m assuming it’s anything that isn’t Freeview. I'm confidant that, if you're that way inclined, you will still manage to waste your life watching Freeview and fulfill another benefit recepient stereotype). As an aside I’m pretty sure if you’re locked into a contract with a company like Sky or Virgin they won’t look kindly on you cancelling it mid contract and will wallop you with fines, which you then won’t be able to pay because your only access to currency is a flimsy little plastic card that bars you from buying anything but pre-approved items.

One also can’t help but wonder how far they’d go with this. Will it be extended to banning you from buying anything but economy brand food? How about if you insist on shopping at Sainsburys? Will it frog march you down to Lidl to save the Treasury pennies? There’s also the assumption that the government (and Alec Shelbrooke in particular) know exactly what ‘essentials’ are. You might not starve to death if you don’t buy your child a birthday cake or present, but it seems unnecessarily cunty to deny them these little things because their parents had the audacity to lose their jobs.

Right, now I’ve done my nit picking we can move onto the moral objections. Chiefly among the moral objections is HOW FUCKING DARE HE?! What gives this trumped up Tory fuckwit the right to tell people how to live their lives? Treating people on benefits like idiots who don’t know what’s good for them is far more damaging than the odd snifter of booze or puff on a cigarette. It infantilises people and will only build up resentment for the government and the agencies that are trying to support them.

There is also the pretty insulting implication that people who are on benefits are utterly feckless and can’t handle being trusted with money. How would Alec Shelbrooke like it if they lost their job and, rather than being treated like a human being, they were treated like an incompetent fool that can’t be trusted not to drink themselves to death as soon as their given a lump sum in cash? Because that’s what this outrageous proposal will mean. This is the further dehumanisation and vilification of people on benefits. People who have done nothing wrong and need support. People who may be going through a very rough patch in their lives. Ideas like this, although not law, feed into misconceptions that blight the lives of millions of people. This will do no good at all.

Also has that arrogant thundercock ever considered that, when you’re at your lowest, you might need a few comforts to make you feel better? As us dole bunnies look like we’re about to lost the right to a pint down the pub with mates I suggest we be allowed to lynch clueless Tory MPs.

The Joys of Being Dole Scum

In January I booked a hotel for four nights in Whitby for me and a couple of friends to go to the Whitby goth festival. I thought this would be fine, because, when I booked it, I assumed I would be doing a PhD or between courses and therefore pretty flexible. But things didn’t quite go to plan and three very tragic things happened to me. One, I had to leave Newcastle, two I had to go on the dole and three I had to move to Wakefield.

If you’ve ever been to Wakefield I don’t need to explain which of those three was the worst. If you haven’t then good for you.

But I digress. I now am pretty solidly on the dole. As of Monday they started paying me and everything, although they took their sweet time. I’m now going to refer to a span of twenty two days as a ‘JSA Fortnight’. And, because I think it’s only fair that if you enter an agreement with someone you uphold your end of the deal I’ve been looking for jobs and signing on and not being late to appointments (harder than you’d think with the bus service near me). So I’ve maintained the moral high ground over the job centre. Go me.

Except my signing on day falls on a day I’m going to be at the seaside. It’s not a complicated procedure. You fill in a form and then come in the day after you get back and sign on and then everything goes back to normal. Except some of the things it asks you to do just seem a bit, well, dickish. For example, you have to say you are prepared to return from your holiday if you get offered an interview. If you do not say you are prepared to do this it goes to a decision maker and you could lost four weeks work of payments. For those of you who think that’s fair enough think about what that actually entails. What could possibly be your only holiday in years is cut short because some bloodthirsty capitalist can’t be bothered to reschedule. And what if you’re there with other people? Do they have to come home too? What if you can’t? What if you don’t drive or you didn’t take your car or you went with advance train tickets and don’t feel like selling your kidney for replacements?

Also I’m pretty sure most employers would be understanding and give you a couple of days grace. Yeah, I know I just called them bloodthirsty capitalists but I got caught up in the moment a bit. I apologise.

Anyway, back to that bloody form. You also have to promise that you’ll keep checking for jobs. I’m jammy. I have internet access on my phone (in theory. Previous experience suggests signal is less than reliable in Whitby) so I can check job sites etc. What if a person has no internet on their phone? They could look in a local paper I suppose, but how useful is a bar job in Brighton to someone who lives in Carlisle?    

But these are just pedantic points dreamt up by me on the bus home. My biggest bugbear is the wording and tone of the form. They kept most of it so I no longer have the juiciest examples but the attitude was that I had done something unforgiveable in asking to go on a trip that had been booked for nearly ten months and at the time of booking, as far as I knew, I would be free. It’s symptomatic of the view expressed by every oozing, self-righteous corner of this country that people on the dole (or any benefit you care to think of) are scum. We’re less than ‘normal’ people and not only do we not deserve the same rights we don’t even deserve the same courtesies.

To be on JSA in 2012 is to constantly search for jobs. It is to never go out, never spend any of the governments money on anything ‘frivolous’ (screw you wankers. I had a half hour wait for my bus and I spent dole money on a second hand paperback and a coffee. A Costa coffee. I am a terrible person). It is to understand that it’s only by the grace of the benevolent state that you don’t starve to death. Although they were so slow processing my claim if I hadn’t had caring and patient parents I would have starved to death. Twice. It is to feel constantly ashamed and like a failure and live with the reality that you are the lowest of the low. As if I didn’t feel like that already.

It’s the same sort of mind set that assumes dole bunnies are scroungers sitting on their arse all day. I know from personal experience that it’s really hard to do fuck all on the dole. Last time I was on it my old computer in its final weeks of life ate an e-mail where I applied for a job. They stopped my JSA for six weeks because I ‘failed’ (accidently I might add) to apply for one vacancy. I had applied for twenty three others in the previous four weeks. Oh, that was over Christmas as well.

So, although I think it’s perfectly acceptable to tell the job centre you’re going away, re-arrange your sign on date and, if possible, keep looking for jobs/checking on jobs applied for it is not acceptable to treat people like this. People on JSA, as the name suggests, are seeking jobs. That can be a really hard thing and if they’ve just been made redundant or something similar it can be a pretty shitty time. They need support not stigmatisation.

Disclaimer: the people who work at Wakey job centre are all really kind and helpful. It’s the system that’s bollocks, not them. As well as being insulting this form was also quite confusing so the lovely Wakey job centre people talked me through it.

P.S. This blog is not getting an introduction. Everytime I tried to write one it sounded shit so I gave up.