Initial Thoughts about Crystal

I recently let my curiosity get the best of me, and signed up for an account at Crystal.

Here are my initial thoughts.

Sign up was interrupted by a message that I would have to "apply" and that my application was awaiting approval. Then I was offered a chance to jump the line by tweeting about Crystal. Hmm. Okay, I went ahead with it because I wanted to see what would happen. I got approved pretty quickly. Subsequently, I asked a couple of colleagues about this, and both said that they did not tweet but still got approved right away. Seems a bit of a ploy, frankly.



The claim: "Crystal knows millions of personalities and tells you the best way to communicate with each one of them" is bold. My background in psychology includes an understanding that truly knowing someone's personality is a difficult and often time-consuming effort. Then again, getting a general sense of someone can take place in less than one second - the old adage that first impressions matter. Perhaps Crystal falls somewhere in the space between these extremes? Could it be that the company has developed a truly nuanced algorithm that unveils vital and unique traits?

I dutifully filled in my profile, and tried to be 100% honest (an unresolved question in psychology is of course whether any of us can truly be honest with ourselves). Then I pulled up my profile, as determined by Crystal.

The summary statement: "Douglas is fairly aggressive, methodical, and results-driven, but can be approachable and supporting of others."

That's not too far off, to be honest. In fact I find a humorous if perhaps scary irony in the combination of aggressive and methodical - makes me sound like some kind of meticulous serial killer! But one with whom you might have tea and get some friendly support!

Yikes! Image source: http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/deathbattlefanon/images/c/ca/Hannibal_Lecter.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140831045736

The profile continues:


Again, this isn't too far off - at least IMHO. I'd be curious what others thought, of course. I certainly love the idea of receiving short emails that get right to the point!

Finally, more about me according to Crystal:


They certainly nailed the "patiently wait in line" item - my wife was cracking up over that one. I'm feeling slightly defensive about the subtleties and nuances bit, I'd like to think I'm not totally tone deaf to what's going on around me, but perhaps I do have a tendency to blunder forward eagerly before paying a bit more attention to nuanced feedback (like nonverbal cues, hints, emotional reactions, etc.). That's the clumsy puppy part of me.

Couldn't resist. Image source: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/BzZqIvSVmeg/hqdefault.jpg

So, I'd say at first blush that Crystal seemed to do pretty well.

Time to dig further.

I found other people I know by digging around with Crystal's search engine, and I also opted to install a Chrome plugin that would allow me to see Crystal's personality assessment for any folks I could look up on LinkedIn. That seemed a bit intriguing. However, as I poked around and clicked and looked at results for numerous people (some similar to me, others quite different),  I started to feel a sense of familiar disappointment. Allow me to digress slightly to make this point.

I had a rather curmudgeonly teacher in 9th grade for Rhetoric class (do they still have such classes?). Despite his general grumpiness (or maybe that was just his act, I never quite decided if he was sort of faking the whole routine), I'll never forget some of the lessons that Mr. Reid taught us. One that has continued to ring true now for over three decades of my life: beware of glittering generalities.





The example we looked at carefully was the Daily Horoscope. It's easy to read these - hell I still do from time to time because it's just plain entertaining - partly because they always seem to "ring true". At least that's the initial impression. But when you dissect and think it through, they ALL ring true! That's because they are written to accomplish just that. Sigh.

So, Crystal - at least to me - started to feel like horoscopes. The descriptions SOUNDED accurate, but when I saw them repeated over and over for very different people, and when I saw more and more internal contradictions (like my own aggressive + methodical), I became more and more skeptical.

Another aspect of Crystal also had me feeling slightly itchy. I could pick other people, and answer questions about them. Of course that's all fine and dandy among friends, but imagine a situation where others (perhaps even in a coordinated effort) decided to take someone down, or at least to make someone appear to be very different than they are. How does Crystal protect against that? What's to stop Crystal from devolving into another idea like the almost-universally-reviled "Peeple" ? (an ugly concept for a human-reviewing app, like a sort of Yelp for people, that seems so ripe for abuse). UPDATE: see end of this post for Crystal's response to my worry.

My conclusion:? Crystal is mildly interesting, but I would be very skeptical of what I read about anyone else, and I most-certainly would not *rely* on Crystal to determine a person's actual fitness or readiness to be hired, befriended, respected, etc. I have no idea if the platform will improve over time, but for now:

Image source: https://img1.etsystatic.com/031/0/6670245/il_570xN.505297045_m5d0.jpg

UPDATE: Crystal tweeted the following to me, good-to-know: