You know what they say: big car, small...

When it comes to assessing our suitability for jobs, companies have countless tools at their disposal. They can interview us. They can interpret our body language and/or analyse our facial features as they interview us. They can measure our IQ or EQ or SQ, examine our handwriting, ask us to undergo psychometric tests, contact former employers for references.

But now there is a new assessment method on the block: automotive psychology. In short, it involves analysing the cars we drive, in the belief that they provide important clues to our psychological make-up. And, always keen to appraise new appraisal tools, Snakes & Ladders decided to – ahem - test-drive the new methodology by contacting Conrad King, “Europe’s highest profile motoring psychologist”, and asking him to provide some “automotive psychoprofiles” of leading business people, on the basis of their cars alone.

To provide a proper analysis King said he needed to know the condition of the car in question, how many miles it had done, the music being played on the stereo, the number plate, and the colour and engine type, but was persuaded to have a stab on the basis of the make and model alone – which were the only details that could be gleaned from newspaper profiles.

And the test began very well: King spotted straight away that one of the cars in the list - a Honda Accord - didn’t belong a chief executive at all, but had been inserted as a test. And then he remarked that the driver of the S-Class Mercedes, was “over 40 and not very keen to listen to excuses”, “efficient” and “cool enough to not blink when making decisions that had enormous implications”, which seemed a fair enough summary of its owner, Vodafone’s Arun Sarin. Meanwhile, the driver of the Lincoln Town Car had, King said, “a traditional way of doing business”, a statement which could certainly be applied to its driver, Warren Buffet.

However, after this things started to go awry. The driver of the Audi A6, King said, was “likely to be male”, when in fact it was Hewlett-Packard’s one-time female ceo Carleton Fiorina, and the driver of the new Volkswagen Beetle was “likely to be female”, when in fact was Wal-Mart’s H. Lee Scott Jr. Meanwhile, King’s analysis of the driver of the final vehicle on the list – a silver Mercedes Vaneo – couldn’t have been more inaccurate. “The person with the Vaneo wants you to think that they are sensible and not flash,” he wrote. “They are, however, unable to let go of enough of their ego to actually get a better car for the money.”

The owner is actually Damon Dash, the super-flash multi-millionaire hip-hop record producer, notorious for enjoying Cristal champagne and wearing "iced out" diamond-encrusted watches. In a recent interview he was quoted saying: "My ride (car) has to make a point and the point is that I have cake (money). I never travel alone. I have a point car with security out front and a blocker to the rear. I don't like security but I have to have it. I travel in a van wherever I go. It makes the point."

Oh dear. It’s a radical suggestion, we realise, but maybe it’s time employers tried to work out what potential employees were like by reading their CVs...