I Am Never Lonely:

A brief history of employee personality testing

by Ana Marie Cox | Issue #21

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I spent twenty hours a week in a small, gray-paneled cubicle calling up strangers and asking them, "Do you approve or disapprove of the job George Bush is doing as president?"

Hey, I was getting paid. It was shortly after the first Gulf War, and the responses to this question were depressingly positive. Still, I liked my job. I was working for Gallup Polls; it had name recognition, the pay was good, and the work itself (which also included conducting customer-satisfaction surveys and marketing research) was interesting. So, despite my distaste for the answers I was getting to the approval-rating poll, I worked hard, was productive, and even occasionally participated in quasi-humiliating "team-building exercises." I was a model employee.

Gallup knew it would be so. They had given me a personality test, after all. Indeed, after I was recommended to them by a friend who already worked at Gallup, the personality test was the only hurdle I faced.