Pre-Employment Personality Assessment
/Suzy Eynon
Select any words that
you feel
describe the way you are supposed to act:
◻ Patient
◻ Responsive
◻ Social
In your late teens, you work the register at a big-box pet store for a month. Someone checking out with an urgent, angry desire for lizard food tells you to hurry up. Your manager explains to you, their poor planning is not your emergency. You quit after being asked to speak more enthusiastically over the loudspeaker as you announce wet cleanup, aisle five.
◻ Rational
◻ Discreet
For years, on and off, you work at a small urgent care center. You fetch the mail, drop the daily deposits at the bank, sign medical forms and checks with the doctor’s name for his wife, who runs the center. You work closely with the wife, even going to her house to assist with filing their personal documents. One time they ask you to watch hours of black and white video footage on your home VCR to identify who has been driving behind the center at night. You are so good at putting things where they belong, moving papers from one container to the next. She asks you to file that letter away under assholes, and you are unsure if this means the trash can or an actual file, so you carefully print assholes onto a vanilla-colored folder and slip it into the cabinet.
◻ Persistent
◻ Resilient
◻ Efficient
The maid service requires you to sign a waiver that if you don’t return for the second day, you are not paid for the first. This must be illegal, you realize years later, but at the time you are young and don’t say anything. The crew lead shows you how to rub olive oil into a stainless-steel refrigerator to make it shine. The homeowner works on a painting in the next room, her easel set up in view of the work. This is the strangest part to you, that she watches the crew while painting, creating art while you scrub. You have contamination obsessive-compulsive disorder and cry while you wipe a urine ring from the base of a toilet. A terrible Adam Sandler song plays on a loop in your head – you’re not to listen to the radio and this was before everyone had cell phones – the one about a piece of shit car. You don’t return for day two.
◻ Responsible
◻ Trustworthy
You work at a mall bookstore for a season. Your ex-boyfriend comes through your line as he buys gifts for neighborhood children. He once impersonated you to your beeper provider after you’d broken up, to ask them to reset your voicemail password, so he could record your outgoing message for you to find the next time you called in as a gotcha. Before you quit at the height of the season, you swipe a copy of Jewel’s poetry book from the shelf, a Christmas gift for your
little sister.
◻ Secure
◻ Dependable
◻ Loyal
You have a temp job where your only task is to sit at a word processor, which is on a little table, and type information into medical forms. The forms spit out the back in an endless wave. The company mentions they would like to hire you, but that the temp agency’s fee is high. You quit the temp agency but are let go from the job the next day. You ride the elevator down with the team one last time, the radio in your grip the only item that needs removal. One of the managers tells you, as a parting sentiment, word of advice – don’t work for temp agencies, get a real job.
◻ Careful
◻ Aware
◻ Assertive
For a year, you have a job as a marketing assistant which means you copy-paste contact information into spreadsheets to share with the financial advisers you serve, clean the coffee maker, wipe off the long glass meeting table on the sixteenth floor before their client meetings under the gaze of bloody bear and bull paintings. One afternoon, after your shift ends, you wait to catch the bus back north of the city. You decide to treat yourself, buy a book at the shop near the bus stop. When you imagine working in the city, you picture yourself walking down the street with determination, coffee cup in hand, so you buy a plastic tumbler. After, as you step up to the rear door of the bus to climb aboard, a man thrusts out both arms, his hands palming your breasts through your business casual shirt. You look up in alarm, taking in his face, but are so caught off guard, you don’t yell or knock him away or react in any way. You don’t scream. Your body is already in motion, propelled toward that closing back door. You can’t pivot mid-leap to change course. You weren’t created for such graceful redirection. On the bus, you look around. Did anyone see what just happened? You’re vibrating. No one gives any indication they’ve just witnessed anything. The bus hurtles up Third. You’re already on your way home. You don’t know who to tell. Your face feels hot. Ten miles away, you call the non-emergency number from your kitchen. The man is kind, suggests that you learn a martial art. You took karate as a teenager, but you don’t say that. You feel as if you’ve done something, at least, by reporting the incident, so you might appear as a number in a transit crime report. You tell your mother, hoping for sympathy, and she advises you to take a shower, wash that right off. When you were young, your mother would relocate items that caused emotional distress to the garage, where they couldn’t reach her mind. You throw the business casual shirt in the trash.
Select any words that you
yourself
feel describe you:
◻ Shy
◻ Quiet
◻ Emotional
◻ Nervous
◻ Avoidant
◻ Smart
◻ Flighty
◻ Disloyal
◻ Empathetic
Author’s Note: I was recently asked to complete a personality assessment while interviewing for a job. I stumbled over the questions because the assessment is a kind of game. Does it require being good at playing the game, or knowing how others see you versus how you see yourself? I wanted to play with the contrast between what the assessment and employers ask of you, and with your lived reality.
Suzy Eynon is a writer from Arizona. She has an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, South Dakota Review, Rejection Letters, Variant Lit, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle with her cats.
