So I'm applying for a job and the company using Arctic Shores assessment. One of the tasks is displaying faces and assigning emotions to them. Is this legal as surely this is direct discrimination against autistic applicants?
So I'm applying for a job and the company using Arctic Shores assessment. One of the tasks is displaying faces and assigning emotions to them. Is this legal as surely this is direct discrimination against autistic applicants?
I'm intrigued as to what the job is that you're applying for and how assigning emotions to faces relates to it? As others have said, it depends whether this is a relevant skill needed for the job.
I'm intrigued as to what the job is that you're applying for and how assigning emotions to faces relates to it?
It is not that the job requires this specific skill but rather a fairly complex set of questions that build up a profile of the character of the interviewee.
This link explains the theory behind them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics
When you consider how many people post on this site about issues they have in work with understanding their colleagues / managers, the team social interactions, handling customers or many of the day to day aspects of the job (phones ringing, multi tasking, pressure to deliver and of course managing others - we (neurodivergents) have become a problem hire in a lot of roles that stress our weaknesses.
With this track record the company has developed a way to filter out people who do not meet the personality type that the companies have found to be a stable hire in such a situaiton.
Does this disadvantage autists - most certainly.
Does it give companies more reliable hires - also most certainly.
From the companies perspective they can hide behind the test results and say "it wasn't me guv, we just folllowed their recommendations" so absolves them of claims of discrimination.
You can game the system - I certainly did in my last decade of so of management when I had to do these - but I understood enough about psychology and the testing process to know what they were looking for so gave them answers they wanted.
There seem to be plenty of test prep sites out there where you can prepare yourself and get better at what is effectively masking - it seems the only way to beat that part of the system.
Is it wrong? Not from the employers perspective but probably yes from an autists perspective. Alas we have no effective way to protest this while it is giving positive results for the employers.
Sorry, but that's just not what the latest research is showing. In fact, increasingly psychometrics are being called out over the appropriateness of their use. Psychometrics are, in effect a house built upon sand. There are numerous claims and criticisms of the fundamental principles upon which they are built. J. Uher does a great job of exploring many of these in their piece as published in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/teo0000176).
Having hired people myself in the past one of the things I will say as an employer is that often it's the people I liked the least who were the best suited for the job. They worked the hardest and provided the best results. Their social interactions within the workplace, their personal hobbies - none of it was relevant. Famously, a double act on TV that had great on screen chemistry was Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of Discovery Channel's Mythbusters, even in some places claiming they actively dislike each other. However, Hyneman hired Savage despite this dislike and they created a successful product that lasted well over fifteen years. They are on record in numerous places about how they aren't friends and haven't even ever had a meal together. This isn't uncommon in workplaces, and definitely isn't uncommon in the entertainment industry let me tell you.
It's also worth taking apart the idea that these tests give employers something to hide behind - a quick internet search would reveal just how many big UK companies have fallen foul of discrimination laws - specifically with respect to Autistic or Asperger's folks. BT, UK Government are just two such organisations which have lost discrimination cases where psychometric testing was used. So an employer thinking they can hide behind these processes - it's not entirely convincing. And that's before we get into the requirement under the Data Protection Act 2018 for a company to be clear about when a decision is made about someone using automated processes. If a computer program had an impact on a decision based on your data - there is a legal requirement for that to be made clear...despite the fact that often it isn't and companies ignore this section of the law.
The problem is that we actually do have mechanisms (tribunals) to whom we can take discrimination cases - it is just that sadly the process is a long drawn out one.
The weakness of course in both of our positions is the relative sparsity in research into the recruitment process itself. There's almost no data on which recruitment processes produce the best workers. Nothing objective to which we can point and say 'here's some evidence'. I actually started to work on some research focused specifically on the entertainment industry which is discriminatory at its baseline (judging on looks before almost anything else). Sadly, the prohibitive costs of running such research mean that the field is ill understood and ill-defined. HR, Recruitment and other such fields are frequently making it up as they go along and trying to wield tools they ill-understand like the aforementioned psychometric testing. I dearly wish there was some solid and independent research that could clear through some of this stuff.
I will say as an employer is that often it's the people I liked the least who were the best suited for the job. They worked the hardest and provided the best results.
It would depend on whether they were the best candidate for the role - if you gave them the position over a better suited candidate then this is a from of reverse bias, but bias none the less.
I have recruited autists (quite common to find them applying for IT support roles hoping to be behind the scenes fixinig stuff rather than customer facing or on the phones a lot,
It has been my experience that they stuggle with many aspects of the job, whether having to speak to user on the phone or face to face, dealing with multiple streams of work at the same time, the often loud office environments (phones ringing, people talking and stuff beeping) and the incessant flow of work from multiple sources that has to be responded to in agreed time periods.
The pressures are a major stresser, the noise and bustle frustrating, the endless stream of work demoralising and the time demands to meet Service Level Agreements on time response being the thing that tips them over the edge.
There is no rocket science, just a steady, focussed effort needed to balance all the demands.
If you add in conflcting personalities to the mix then this creates the risk of explosions of negative emotion in my experience. Whether it is arguements, constant sniping or micro bullying or just meltdowns - it means the right personaity needs to be found to integrate well into the team.
Psychometric tests do filter out a lot of unsuitable candidates from where I have had to use them so while they may be discriminatory they do a similar job that an experienced recruiter would - score down those who they believe would not survive and benefit the team.
I can only speak from experience of hiring all levels of support staff and lower level management (probably about 100 hires over 32 years).
If I kept giving those candidates a chance who I strongly suspected would not survive just to avoid discrimination cases then I would loose my job for underperforming once those hires started going on stress related sick leave, quitting or performing so poorly they were put on PIPs.
What would you do in this sort of situation?
I will say as an employer is that often it's the people I liked the least who were the best suited for the job. They worked the hardest and provided the best results.
It would depend on whether they were the best candidate for the role - if you gave them the position over a better suited candidate then this is a from of reverse bias, but bias none the less.
I have recruited autists (quite common to find them applying for IT support roles hoping to be behind the scenes fixinig stuff rather than customer facing or on the phones a lot,
It has been my experience that they stuggle with many aspects of the job, whether having to speak to user on the phone or face to face, dealing with multiple streams of work at the same time, the often loud office environments (phones ringing, people talking and stuff beeping) and the incessant flow of work from multiple sources that has to be responded to in agreed time periods.
The pressures are a major stresser, the noise and bustle frustrating, the endless stream of work demoralising and the time demands to meet Service Level Agreements on time response being the thing that tips them over the edge.
There is no rocket science, just a steady, focussed effort needed to balance all the demands.
If you add in conflcting personalities to the mix then this creates the risk of explosions of negative emotion in my experience. Whether it is arguements, constant sniping or micro bullying or just meltdowns - it means the right personaity needs to be found to integrate well into the team.
Psychometric tests do filter out a lot of unsuitable candidates from where I have had to use them so while they may be discriminatory they do a similar job that an experienced recruiter would - score down those who they believe would not survive and benefit the team.
I can only speak from experience of hiring all levels of support staff and lower level management (probably about 100 hires over 32 years).
If I kept giving those candidates a chance who I strongly suspected would not survive just to avoid discrimination cases then I would loose my job for underperforming once those hires started going on stress related sick leave, quitting or performing so poorly they were put on PIPs.
What would you do in this sort of situation?
