The Alphabet Test – The Weird Side of the Internet

The Alphabet Test – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Interviews are tough. I’m not talking about interviewing a band or an actor; I’m talking about interviewing a prospective employee. Or maybe I should say being interviewed.

It ain’t like it used to be. I won’t go into the fact that “entry level” now requires a Master’s degree and pays minimum wage; that’s a topic for another news hour. But being interviewed, sitting there across the desk from someone with a criteria and a stack of resumes of possibly qualified applicants and a million ways in their head they can pass you by and only a handful of ways you get the golden ticket.

It’s amazing that anyone actually gets to the interview. They use AI to weed out resumes, and building a successful resume is now all about coding your life history for the AI. You could have spent your life selling cigarettes in pool halls, and if you use the right sentence structure and keyphrases, you’ll wind up sitting down on the big day with your hopes and your dreams and your likely padded CV and you will be greeted with…

The alphabet test.

This one came from a Redditor who asked HR interviewers if they had any tests they give applicants, and the one that came up with the “alphabet test.” The interviewer, at some point in the interview, asks the interviewee to write out the alphabet. They do this for a couple of reasons. One sounds crazy, but it’s to see how well you know the alphabet. A lot of the world is alphabetized. Second reason is to see a.) will you just do something without needing to know why, and b.) will you just do something without wanting to know why.

I remember at a dollar-type store they had a bunch of honesty tests on the application. Would you steal? Have you ever? Would you tell on somebody? So a whole bunch of people lied about being honest and ended up working at the Dollar Store.

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