This documentary was made using CNN. This fact is enough to understand what this film is or with what agenda (agenda) it goes in addition.
In the film, we are told about the negative effect of the tests that are applied to candidates for a particular position (mainly large corporations). We are told the story of the emergence of the world-famous Myers-Briggs test. In psychology, this is the most famous test that should show what type of personality a person belongs to. It seems that it can be scary, because we all pass such tests and even sometimes find it funny. But it’s fun until it’s up to you whether you’re hired or not. The film tells that employers, using these tests, filter people simply because they did not pass this test, more precisely, that this test showed that the applicant does not match the position for which he applied (as employers themselves claim, they are forced to apply the test, because they receive too many applications for employment to be able to conduct a personal interview with each applicant).
There are no statistics or even major sociological studies on “How effective is this approach for employers?”, and there are stories of several people who were not hired as a result of this test. The authors of the film accuse employers and the whole system of implementation and use of such tests (this is a big industry, by the way) of discrimination. The authors of the film claim that the tests were created by white, heterosexual men and that is why such tests filter out all those who are: 1. Not white; 2. Not heterosexual; 3. Not a man. Would you say that such accusations require substantial evidence and are they present in this film? That's the problem!
I agree with the main premise of the film that the tests guarantee nothing and provide a very simplistic view of human psychology. Thus, a person in some circumstances may behave as an introvert, but in others as an extrovert, which means that the decisive factor is the situation, and only a secondary factor is the type of personality. These tests are not able to determine whether a person will be a successful salesman (see the story of Joe Girard, who made the Guinness Book of Records as the greatest salesman in the world and whose hot-tempered temper and early business failures could lead to the test showing his complete inability to be a successful salesman) or an effective CEO. All of these tests give an assessment of the situation in the laboratory or, better to say, artificial conditions, but people do not work in an artificial environment and therefore all of these tests are initially not able to show and predict the behavior of hired people. To explain this thesis, the film could not, because everything slid into the usual political propaganda a la sexist/racist/homophobe and just scum (if none of the previous options did not fit).
When you expect a thoughtful and serious (in this genre, of course) analysis from the film, and you are offered typical propaganda in the spirit of “they are bad, because they are all racists”, you begin to be very skeptical, because it is already very difficult to believe in the impartiality of their judgment. Here is one of the heroines of the film, who just accused the corporations using these tests of racism and so on. Her story is that she just didn't like the idea that she was forced to take some kind of test when she was hired. Or another person with bipolar disorder who was also not hired because of this test. In the film, the father fights with the company and wants to get a court to ban such tests. You say, what's the big deal? The fact that this young man committed suicide. He was not hired and he committed suicide. Well, there may have been another reason, but the film clearly shows that the incident upset him so much that given his psychological problem, it influenced his decision to die. And that's when you start asking yourself questions like, "Yes, the tests aren't effective, but in this case, are they so wrong?"
I don’t think the refusal to hire was fair or that this young man posed a danger to the rest of the employees of the enterprise he wanted to get into, but did the filmmakers not realize that by showing and telling us this young man’s story, they were undermining their own arguments? In other words, it's obvious that he's had psychological problems, because to suicidal just because some employer didn't hire you is like a clinic. After all, this young man decided to sue the company that did not accept him. You can imagine a person who, if I'm not mistaken, decided not to even start his career, but just to earn a little part-time money as a student, decides to start a lawsuit because some company did not accept it. We'll lose our entire population if everyone commits suicide because someone refuses to hire them! It is enough to read the stories of (successful) people who tell how they got their dream job or how they started their careers, for they always, always feature the fact that they were rejected dozens of times, by many dozens of employers, until they finally got the right employer. And here, the first employer refused and immediately the court and then suicide.
I can understand the story of black people not being hired just because they are black, but the film is very bad, because we see a black man who ... served time for some offense (although such people should be able to get a good job if society does not want them to return to their former criminal life).
I said at the outset that the film tells us the story of this world-famous test and that it was not without politics. So, we are told that after the most difficult searches in the archives, the researcher managed to get a very important document. The man who is behind the creation of the Myers-Briggs test is also the author of several works of art and here in one work there is a detective who deals with the death/suicide of members of the same noble family. So they committed suicide because they thought there was black blood in their blood (and they were like white aristocrats). This gives this researcher an argument to claim that the author of this famous Myers test, Briggs, is a white supremacist. How easy and simple it was!