Personality Profiles..

[hondovious]

My company is asking me to take a personality profile for a 3rd party's use (one of our vendors.) They are trying to build a profile for an ideal tech. BUT, there have been no assurances or even a reference to confidentiality, only a disclaimer that they can share this profile with whatever parties directed me there. The website also has a user

Comments

[cobaltamber]

I'll check with the people i work with, but yes....i totally agree, i don't think they can force you to take anything of the sort. They could probably *ask* you to personally *write* a little something about what you'd like other ominous, unspecified third parties to know about the ever-powerful-ninja-tech-man that you are, but even that shouldn't be nearly as personally invasive as taking some personality psyche test. Plus if your whole company is having to take it, you certainly wouldn't have any privacy at all, i get the feeling that in the land of computers, among the knowledgeable enlightened ones, nothing is ever private or safe. This personality profile thing might also be mainly for the company itself...to keep an eye on 'those deemed undesirable'. Like i said, i'll check with some of the attys here.

[thorolf]

I used to work in an HR department where we used Myers-Briggs as a management tool - but participation was voluntary (and workshop-based). I personally would not be too worried about the personality profile piece - it's normally used (incorrectly) to pigeonhole people into a category in order to make it easier for managers to try to tailor their BS for your specific set of filters... not that I'm cynical about it or anything. Stuff like this can be used to make management/labor relations smoother, and good managers will learn not to use "one-size-fits-all" solutions on their personnel - but this assumes that they've been taught to be good managers in the first place.

From a privacy perspective, though, I'd be concerned. Obviously, the 3rd party folks need to get this data from the company offering the web-based test, and they need some way to tie it to you specifically - but in this day and age, anyone doing business across the web needs some solid privacy policies in place as a CYA measure, if nothing else.