You Should be a Project Manager Can Neuroscience Help You Find the Right Career

You Should be a Project Manager Can Neuroscience Help You Find the Right Career Not too long ago, I jokingly tweeted that every startup describes itself the same way x company for y niche. Take a stroll through AngelList and youll binnenlandsee what I mean Crossfader is Instagram for music Dealflicks is Priceline for movie tickets and my personal favorite though it only adheres to the spirit of my joke while discarding the strict form is uBiomes big data from bacteria, because it sounds like a tagline for a biopunk novel.I suppose this formula caught on because, used correctly, it can be intriguing put a familiar product in a strange place, and people will want to see what happens.Im elend immune to it when Matthew Malter Cohen, head of product at the career-assessment and hiring platform Pymetrics, told me I could think of the platforms service as similar to the way Netflix matches movies to yo ur preferences, except were matching applicants to the companies preferences, I welches hooked. Thats mostly because Netflixs strangely specific genre suggestions have always amused me (though, they seem slightly tamer in recent days, dont they?), and I wanted to see if Pymetrics would suggest careers with a similarly fine-toothed approach Feel-good nonprofit organizations with a strong female boss, perhaps?Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Pymetrics takes its career suggestions more seriously than Netflix takes its movie recommendations, but that doesnt mean that the platform isnt a whole lot of strange, bemusing, enlightening fun.Online Job Hunt 3.0Currently in beta, Pymetrics uses a series of neuroscience-based games borrowed from research labs to assess your cognitive and emotional profile. It then uses that information to determine which industries and companies are good fits for you. The way that we do that matching is that we actually have profiles in our database of successf ul employees in those industries and at those companies, and we match your profile to them, Cohen explained.The idea is that it is available online to any student or jobseeker to use, Cohen added. it functions essentially like a marketplace.I played the role of intrepid jobseeker, and I can confirm that Pymetrics is every bit as easy to use as Cohen says. You simply pop over to the Pymetrics website, fill out a brief profile or connect your LinkedIn page, and start playing games. The more games you play, the more information Pymetrics has to build a complex cognitive/emotional profile for you. The more complex your profile, the more accurate your career suggestions.Companies can use Pymetrics as a talent-sourcing avenue. In the same way that the platform gives jobseekers career recommendations, it gives organizations access to a database of candidates who are good fits for them. And they only see good fits, Cohen said. Obviously, you wouldnt want to be putting information out there that is negative about yourself.Lets say your results suggest that youd make a great teacher, but a terrible financier. Pymetrics isnt going to tell the banks you suck its only going to tell the schools they should take a look at you ASAP.We just feel like this is a natural progression in terms of online job hunting, said Cohen. If you think of the original listings hosted by Monster as job hunting 1.0, and LinkedIn is sort of like 2.0, then Pymetrics is 3.0.You Prefer to Process Things Before Reacting to Them(And I suggest you do the same what follows here is an outline of my own personal experience with Pymetrics. Clearly, one user cant claim to represent everyone.)The Pymetrics games are, overall, actually pretty fun, which you may not expect when you hear theyre based in neuroscience. Id compare most of them to Flappy Bird, but without the frustration they generally rely on repeated and strategic keystrokes, which make them potently simple and entrancing. But unlike the mindless hypnotism of Flappy Bird, the Pymetrics games are always built around some sort of thought puzzle, so theres a good deal of cognition required on your part.Its also not always immediately obvious how the games are going to provide insight into your person e.g., Pymetrics was clearly inspecting my emotional intelligence when it asked me to determine the emotions people were feeling based on pictures of their eyes, but the game in which I pressed certain arrow keys depending on the colors and directions of little arrows that popped up onscreen? Still not sure about that one, but I dont necessarily think thats a problem trusting your results is a matter of trusting Pymetricss scientific process in total, not a matter of knowing what each step along the way means. Throwing out your Pymetrics profile because you dont understand a couple of the games you played is like discrediting the results of the Stanford marshmallow experiment because the children who participated didnt understand why they were being asked to not eat marshmallows.But Ill admit whether or not you can readily place your trust in Pymetrics might be a matter of personal conditioning. For those who understand and/or enjoy scientific objectivity, it will be pretty easy to accept Pymetricss revelations precisely because they are relatively untainted by human interpretation. For others, the idea that games will tell you things about yourself and possibly things you didnt know, things you may not agree with is worrisome. I know what I like to do and what Im good at, the thinking goes, why should I listen to a website? I feel like a lot of people will fall somewhere between the two poles.Its a little silly that I can even anticipate this sort of conflicted thinking about Pymetrics, but weve seen how easily the general population can misunderstand science. At some time or another, most of us have been one of those baffled, terrified people. I for one still have no idea who Im supposed to listen to abou t GMOs. But my point is this anytime science tells us something we dont want to hear, there will be people who react negatively. That doesnt mean Pymetrics should give up no, thats all the more reason for Pymetrics to keep fighting the good fight. To quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, Thats the good thing about science Its true whether or not you believe in it.Now, about that section title upon completing any game, Pymetrics offers you what they call an insight a direct, one-sentence summary of what the platform learned about you from that particular game.While the insights themselves arent always illuminating (besides, the real meat is in the reports), they are fun to collect. In fact, they were the number one reason I spent close to two hours researching I took screenshots of all of my insights, and I now proudly have a whole stash in a folder on my desktop.Some of the insights I received were things I already knew about myself, like the one I used to title this section. But Id say an eq ual number of the insights were surprising sometimes, greatly so.What Pymetrics KnowsIf we take the technology metaphor (online job hunt 3.0) and run with it, we can say that, by utilizing neuroscience, Pymetrics hopes to fix a few bugs that currently exist in sourcing, hiring, and job-seeking processes. In fact, the company came about precisely because cofounders Frida Polli (CEO) and Julie Yu (CSO) were unhappy with the methods they saw people using to determine their career paths.According to Cohen, Polli and Yu, both accomplished scientists, met during their postdoctoral days. Polli decided to leave academia, because she wanted to start a business. She went to Harvard Business School (HBS) for her MBA. While at HBS, she took a few of the traditional, questionnaire-style career assessments the MBTI, the Strong Interest Inventory, the Holland Code Career Test, etc.What struck Polli was that the tests are all question and answer, Cohen said. Theyre all asking you essentially about your interests and motivations to tell you what youre good at. From a decade in the lab, being trained as a neuropsychologist, it was very clear to her that this isnt necessarily the best way to understand what someones traits are or what someone is good at.Consider this bug No. 1 questionnaires can help you aggregate and solidify the things you already know about yourself, but they cant reveal anything new about you, because the only input into the questionnaire is what you tell it, to quote Cohen.The problem with relying on our self-knowledge is that its usually inaccurate, so how can we trust that we know ourselves well enough to figure out which career really, truly suits us best? Its not like no ones ever landed a job that was totally wrong for them before.So while Pymetrics did tell me some things I already knew about myself, it also uncovered some character traits I had never picked up on. After I played a game in which I had to repeat sequences of random numbers, Pymetrics told me, If you dont write them down, the details elude you Ominous ellipsis aside, I loved this insight because it was something that I never realized about myself, but I could still immediately see that it was true. My need to record all my interviews so that I cant possibly misquote anyone the notebooks I filled in every course I took at college the endless to-do lists I type up on my PC it all adds up I dont like keeping details in my head.And then there was the time that Pymetrics got mad at me (or, at least, seemed to) I played a game in which I had to divide money between myself and a stranger. I used the same strategy every time make it so that everyone ends up with an even amount of money. Even when given the option to take money from people, I kept everything even. At the end of it all, Pymetrics subtly scolded me the way a sitcom-stereotype spouse might chide her husband for never asking his boss about the raise he deserves Using a situation to pursue your interests can be a real strength.What you Definitely Dont KnowBug No. 2, according to Cohen, is that questionnaires can be faked. Just like with resums, you can sort of understand, if youre an intelligent person, what the person or assessment is asking you to get at. So you can tell it something that gets you the result you desire, Cohen said.As an example, Cohen offered a hypothetical jobseeker looking for a role in finance. In the financial world, its desirable to have employees who respond to and enjoy monetary rewards. By strategically answering certain questions, the jobseeker can game the questionnaire into returning a result that says he likes monetary rewards, even if that isnt true. Now the company is getting an employee who isnt actually a great fit, and the jobseeker is getting a job that theyll probably end up loathing.Earlier, I mentioned playing a game that asked me to guess the emotions people were feeling based on pictures of their eyes. After completing the game, Pymetrics gave me some unsettling news You dont let other peoples emotions affect you. Ouch. Am I a psychopath? Probably not, but I always thought I was super empathetic.But thats part of Pymetricss mission, isnt it? To uncover what we dont know, and to correct what we think we know. Had this been a questionnaire, I would have played up empathy in my answers I would have subconsciously gamed the system, based on a faulty perception of myself. But I didnt have that chance, and it turns out I may need to adjust my self-image accordingly, or maybe focus on building up the empathy I lack but want. Either way, you dont expect a career assessment platform to knock you out of your orbit, but Pymetrics set me on the path of some serious soul-searching with this result.Its results like this that will, I think, lead to some of that conflicted thinking that I mentioned above my gut reaction was to dismiss this result as a mistake. It didnt square with my beliefs, so I wasnt going to listen to it. Sure, even neuroscience-based games can make mistakes, but maybe this wasnt one? I can either approach it as a learning opportunity (regardless of how empathetic one is, its almost always a good idea to try to be even more empathetic), or I can throw out the whole platform because it said something I didnt like. Personally, I think users who take the first approach tap into more of Pymetricss value.Note I dont think this sort of conflict is Pymetricss fault. As I said earlier, I think its simply something that happens when scientific principles enter our personal lives were not used to having them there, and its up to us to figure out how to adjust.Bug No. 3 unconscious biases are a real problem in the world of hiring, and theyre especially hard to overcome because theyre so hard to see. By allowing neuroscience to evaluate candidates fits, Cohen hopes Pymetrics can prevent unconscious biases from ever entering the equation We fit applicants to an industry or company based on their behaviors in the game set. We do not look at things like what your name is, what your gender is, how old you are, Cohen said. All of these characteristics can often unfairly bias a recruiters or hiring managers opinion of a resum outside of even their awareness.I cant personally speak to this, as Im a white male, and therefore not the target of such bias. But I can see how Pymetrics could circumvent these biases, and thats something Im really excited about.Where to Now?The first thing I noticed about Pymetricss results reports is that theyre gorgeously designed. The cognitive/emotional information is organized along colorful, manipulable nodes. The industry fit section offers a circular chart that breaks down how well you fit into a multitude of possible careers. Aside from these visual presentations, both reports also offer detailed verbal analyses of your results.The results are easily the most impressive thing about Pymetrics. I was especially fascinated with my cognitive/emotional profile , which gave me percentile scores for things like trust and attention things that we often think of as thoroughly unquantifiable. For example, I learned that Im exceedingly trusting, with a 100 percent score in that category. Some might say that makes me naive, but I wear it as a badge of honor.These wider categories are broken down to offer more specific insights. For example, I wasnt merely told I was altruistic I was told that Im altruistic after stressful situations. Similarly, my risk/reward results were enlightening in their thoroughness I now know my risk preferences for high-, medium-, and low-risk situations, as well as how I learn from different types of risks and how well I deal with ambiguity. And though the cognitive/emotional profile Pymetrics built for me contained a lot of new information, people close to me confirmed the accuracy of my results.Of course, this is a careers-oriented website, so what we really want to know is how are the career suggestions?Like my per sonal results, I found my industry fit section full of surprises. My top three matches, in order, were project management, technology, and education. About that third result I tried my hand at education for a couple of years, and it was not my thing at all. Does that invalidate the rest of Pymetricss suggestions?Id say no. I checked out the profile of successful educators on Pymetrics, I have all of the described traits. I can also say that every great teacher I worked with had these traits, too. So the educator profile is accurate, and my personal results are accurate but life is weird. Things dont always work out the way they should. Pymetricss neuroscientific approach isnt supposed to be infallible when it comes to people, we can never totally avoid error.And what about my other career recommendations? Ive never considered project management or technology before, but now Im interested. Ultimately, this is the most significant advantage Pymetrics offers over other career assessme nts it uncovers things you wouldnt otherwise learn about yourself. Its not the god of career placement (nor does it claim to be), but its a particularly keen observer.