You recently lost your job as a grocery bagger for a store down the street from your dorm room. You have been thinking about working at the movie theater further down the street because it is close, as was your old job, and you get free movie tickets. One day, you get dressed and walk down the street to enquire about the application process. After leaving the theater, you probably didn’t think anything of the application you filled out on the e-kiosk and the personality test that you had to take to apply.

Personality tests are becoming more common in their use for hiring in organizations. A 2014 report by the business advisory company CEB found that nearly twothirds of human resources professionals are drawing on personality tests in their hiring practices. And it makes sense—“You spend so much money and investment getting someone up to speed and giving them resources, paying them for six or seven months of investment, it’s about $120,000 per person if you keep them nine months and they don’t produce,” Juan Navarro, an executive at SER Solutions, says. Person–organization fit on the applicant’s values has become a common focus of the hiring process, both in marketing the organization to potential applicants and through additional tests and interviews.

But what happens when you take this same approach to hiring but assess political ideology instead? Kyle Reyes, the CEO of The Silent Partner Marketing based in Manchester, Connecticut, has taken this approach by developing a test to weed out applicants who he believes will “whine and complain and come to the table with nothing but an entitled attitude and an inability to back their perspective.” He has eliminated nearly 60 percent of applicants through this process. The test mostly contains questions that revolve around political issues, such as the applicant’s perspectives on the support for police, guns, and patriotism, as well as other political issues. On another front, a bill was introduced to the Senate in the spring of 2017 that would freeze state university hiring until a balance is achieved in political ideology among the faculty professors, who would be required to disclose their affiliation at the time of application.

Questions 

1. Do you think an organization has a right to test your political ideology as a condition of hiring? Why or why not? 

2. Can we differentiate values (such as those used to assess person–organization fit) from political ideology reliably? Why or why not? 

3. Do you think it is important to foster political ideological diversity in organizations? Why or why not?