Monday 9 February 2009

Virgos need not apply - Hiring through horoscope

I've checked the date, and we're still a good few weeks away from 1st April. But how else can you explain an Austrian insurance company selecting employees based on their star signs?

The Salzburg insurance company has performed a statistical analysis of its employees' star signs and have determined that those who are Capricorn, Taurus, Aquarius, Aries and Leo are their best workers. They therefore want to make sure that Sales & Management recruits for 20 new roles also have said star signs.

Now, I haven't been able to find any details of this statistical analysis, and if anyone else has come across it I'd love to see it.

Perhaps the most worrying thing about this is that it doesn't seem to be illegal. In fact, the Salzburg employees council have said:

'When an employer considers star signs and says: "I want to only hire Pisces, for an example, it must be assumed that within this group of people born under the sign of Pisces there are old and young people, women and women etc. It does appear like a certain limitation, but it is not discrimination.'


It'll be interesting to see how astrologers react to this. On the one hand I can see them being happy that a mainstream business is buying into the whole astrology idea, but at the same time I doubt they'd be happy at it being used to discriminate.

The mind boggles!

1 comment:

  1. You might want to check out Quirkology. Research (the proper kind) suggests that people born in summer months will have a more adventurous and positive outlook than those born in winter months. That's about as far as it goes, it seems, and hinges on the seasons. The southern hemisphere reverses the trend.

    What's interesting here is that, with the exception of Leo, which falls in the summer, the "good" months run through from winter into spring, which would suggest that there's no correlation between the seasonal personality traits and the ability to sell insurance.

    Lastly, whereas astrology is clearly bunkum, it may be worthwhile recruiters asking people whether they believe in astrology, and what their star sign is, as believers have a tendancy to adopt the traits of their starsigns. This is no doubt due to them either recognising themselves in the typical astrology character studies and assuming there is "something in it" or believing it in the first place and adapting their personalities to fit.

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