Forget Pisces. Capricorn Is the Better Hire.
Astrology, prejudice and the right to choose badly
Hiring someone? I would steer clear of Pisces.
Creative, intuitive, sensitive, certainly. But if the accounts need closing or a deadline must be met, I would look for something more solid. A Capricorn, for example: methodical, ambitious, reliable, practical, naturally inclined to regard work as something that ought, if possible, to get done.
For methodological transparency, I should disclose that I am a Capricorn. It would hardly be fair, though, to let a modest conflict of interest interfere with the astrological evidence.
Naturally, I am talking nonsense.
The interesting thing is that some people took nonsense of this kind seriously enough to make legislators address it.
In Taiwan, Article 5 of the Employment Service Act prohibits employers from discriminating against applicants and employees on grounds including race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability and other fairly predictable characteristics.
Then, in the middle of the list, appear zodiac sign and blood type.
In Taiwan, therefore, you cannot refuse to hire someone because they are Pisces.
The rule makes us smile, but laws have a curious ability to describe society through what they prohibit. If a legislature feels compelled expressly to ban particular conduct, it is reasonable to suspect somebody was actually engaging in it.
It is a kind of archaeology by absence. If, at the end of the fifth century, Pope Gelasius still felt the need to attack the Lupercalia, more than a hundred years after Christianity’s establishment in the Empire, we can infer that the old pagan ritual had survived somewhere other than books.
Prohibitions, in short, inadvertently certify the vitality of what they prohibit.
The question raised by Taiwan’s law is therefore not: “Did they really legislate about zodiac signs?”
It is: what had Taiwanese employers been doing to make the law necessary?
The answer is remarkable.
When zodiac sign and blood type were added to the protected characteristics in 2018, labour authorities explained that some employers genuinely asked applicants for this information and even used astrology and divination to decide whom to hire.
The Italian legislature evidently had greater faith in the rationality of human resources departments.
Taiwan’s evidently had better information.
The most interesting part, however, is that astrology in recruitment really can work.
It just works on the wrong person.
In 2020, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published research on astrological stereotypes in China. Virgo, for example, carries a particularly negative reputation: difficult and unaccommodating. When an applicant was explicitly identified as a Virgo in recruitment experiments, participants were less willing to hire them.
One possibility remained, improbable but scientifically necessary to examine: perhaps there really was something in the stars. Perhaps Virgos were more difficult, Pisces more unfocused and Capricorns, as seems intuitively obvious, better.
The researchers therefore compared zodiac signs with the personality traits of 173,709 people and the job performance of a further 32,878.
The stars were given a fairly generous opportunity. They did not take it. Zodiac sign predicted neither personality nor professional performance.
This is where the study becomes much more interesting than a horoscope. Astrology did not predict the employee. It predicted the recruiter. Virgos were not less capable; people who believed the stereotype considered them less capable. A false belief thus produced a perfectly real consequence. Psychology has a fairly good understanding of how we fall for this. There is the Forer, or Barnum, effect: we readily recognise ourselves in generic descriptions when presented as personal ones.
“You are independent, but you need appreciation.”
True.
“Sometimes you are sociable; at other times you need your own space.”
Uncanny.
“You have abilities you cannot always fully use.”
Finally, someone understands me.
Confirmation bias then intervenes. We remember successful predictions and discreetly file away the wrong ones. If my horoscope predicts an important encounter and I meet someone on Thursday, Jupiter showed foresight. If I meet nobody for three weeks, I am unlikely to send it a formal notice demanding performance.
We can now address, with sufficient scientific rigour, the really important question: which signs should you hire?
First, Capricorn, naturally. Next comes Virgo, who has probably already found this article’s typos and opened a spreadsheet to record them. Taurus is reliable, provided nobody changes the management software. Scorpio is determined and strategic: I would hire one, while avoiding a badly handled dismissal. With Gemini, the question remains which of the two will turn up on Monday. Pisces comes last mainly because somebody must, and I have already chosen the headline.
The ranking’s scientific value is zero.
But this is where law begins.
In Italy, zodiac sign is not among the usual prohibited grounds of discrimination. Article 8 of the Workers’ Statute does, however, prohibit employers, including when recruiting, from investigating matters irrelevant to assessing professional aptitude.
Seriously asking an applicant’s zodiac sign to decide whether to hire them would therefore pose a legal problem considerably more concrete than Saturn. But consider the more interesting case. The employer asks nothing. They already know the date of birth, discover the applicant is Pisces and reject them. Or, more simply, the applicant gets on their nerves.
Here we need to be serious.
Ultimately, the employer must work with this person. They will entrust clients to them, discuss decisions, tackle problems and spend a considerable part of their life with them. If two applicants are equally competent but one inspires confidence and the other seems unbearable, it is hard to argue that this should be irrelevant.
A private employer is not a public-service examination panel. Liking, trust, perceived authority and compatibility with the team inevitably enter the decision.
The problem is that we do not always know why one person inspires trust and another does not.
We may prefer the more attractive applicant, the taller one, the one with a more confident voice, the one who resembles us or reminds us of someone we admire.
And nobody will ever write:
“Marco was more competent, but Luca was better-looking.”
They will write that Luca had greater presence, better interpersonal skills or a stronger fit with the corporate culture.
And they may not be lying at all.
They may sincerely believe it.
One of psychology’s less reassuring lessons is that we do not perfectly understand the motives for our own choices. We are, however, very good at constructing coherent explanations afterwards. Experiments in so-called choice blindness have shown people confidently justifying choices that experimenters had switched without their knowledge.
The problem of prejudice then becomes much subtler.
It is not only the employer who thinks: “I do not hire Pisces.”
It is also the employer sincerely convinced they assessed merit alone, when their judgment may have incorporated factors of which they are entirely unaware.
This does not mean every subjective impression is discriminatory. That would be absurd. Nor can law demand mathematical rationality in recruitment.
It does something different: it establishes that certain criteria cannot be used, even where they genuinely affect the decision-maker’s preferences.
Taiwan has chosen to include zodiac sign among them.
Seen this way, the rule about Pisces looks much less folkloric.
Indeed, astrology has at least one advantage over many apparently more sophisticated assessments: it makes prejudice so obvious that we immediately smile.
“I do not hire Pisces” sounds foolish.
“They do not project enough leadership” sounds like a professional assessment.
It may be. Or it may be foolishness that has learned to dress better.
Perhaps this is the most interesting point of the entire story: not everything subjective is discriminatory, not everything irrational is unlawful, and not everything that looks rational is the real reason for our choice.
Law cannot read our minds. It can only draw certain boundaries.
From this perspective, at least, astrology has one virtue: it declares its method immediately.
If you really must hire someone, though, choose a Capricorn. After this whole article, it seems frankly pointless to keep pretending they are not the best.
Paolo Fortina · Originally published on LinkedIn on 25 August 2026. Read the original
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