The Use of Assessment Tools (Psychological Tests) That Feels Uncomfortable from a Career Consultant’s Perspective

 

In career consultant training programs, various assessment tools (psychological tests) are introduced and their usage is taught. Among the most well-known are VPI (Vocational Preference Inventory) developed by Holland and GATB (General Aptitude Test Battery) developed by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

When you actually take one of these assessment tools for yourself, you may be surprised or enlightened—"So this is my personality?" or "I have this kind of aptitude?"—or even find yourself reacting with skepticism, saying things like, "No way!" Either way, it provokes a range of responses.

Thus, learning about assessment tools in career consultant training programs is positioned as a way to support “self-understanding.”

But they are strictly considered support tools.
That’s why the training emphasizes not placing absolute trust in the results. You're also taught to always confirm whether the client—who is the one taking the test—actually wants to take it and recognizes its necessity in the first place.

However, this is just the perspective held by career consultants. The people who develop or use assessment tools may have completely different purposes.

Recently, I attended a seminar on employment for foreign workers in Japan, and a flyer was handed out. It promoted a well-known assessment tool, suggesting it be used to avoid mismatches when hiring foreign workers. Another flyer for a different product went so far as to say the tool could be used to “assess the behavior” of foreign candidates.

I couldn’t help but feel uneasy.

I actually work in recruitment too, so after conducting countless interviews, I do understand the temptation to use some assessment tool to easily filter people. In fact, I sometimes use tools like that to measure specific skills or aptitudes. But I never take the results as absolute. You have to really see the person.

Still, the participants in that seminar likely have real, pressing challenges in hiring large numbers of foreign workers. Compared to Japanese workers, communication can be more difficult, and I can understand why there would be a desire to rely on some kind of tool to help screen people.

One of the theories every career consultant learns is trait-and-factor theory—a kind of “matching” theory. The idea is that people have measurable, scientific traits, and that each job requires specific characteristics (factors), and the best outcome is when those two match. This theory still has strong influence today, but it has also been criticized for overly simplifying both people and work. Much of the history of career theory has been about moving beyond this.

But the examples of those assessment tools I mentioned above don’t seem connected to any lofty career theories. In reality, they reflect a continued demand for the kind of thinking embodied by trait-and-factor theory. It really made me think. And yes, with the rapid evolution of AI, the temptation to rely on highly accurate matching is only growing.

To resist that temptation, we need to think more deeply about the potential downsides of excessive matching—but that’s a topic I’ll leave for another article.