Personality Tests

Personality Tests > Introduction

There are only three questions the employer really has to answer during the selection process: Firstly, do you have the right skills and experience? Secondly, do you have the required enthusiasm and motivation? Finally, are you going to fit in, in terms of your personality, attitude and general work style?

Personality has a significant role to play in providing answers to the second and third of these questions. In most working situations it’s the personality of your co-workers and managers that affect the day-to-day success of the organization. If the team doesn't work well together or a manager can’t motivate their staff, then productivity and quality of service will suffer.

The way that most organizations operate has also changed in the last 30 years. There are usually fewer levels of management than there were and management styles tend to be less autocratic. In addition, the move in the western world at least, towards more knowledge based and customer focused jobs means that individuals have more autonomy even at fairly low levels within organizations. The effects of these changes means that your personality is seen by a potential employer as more important now than it was in the past.

Widely Used But Still Controversial
In 2006, personality testing is $450 million industry which has been expanding by about 10% per year. There are currently well over 2,500 personality questionnaires on the market and each year dozens of new companies appear with their own ‘new’ products. Some of these products are broad-spectrum tests designed to classify basic personality types, some are designed to test candidates for suitability for a particular job and some are designed to test for particular traits – for example, honesty and integrity.

There is a historical association with academic and occupational psychology which gives the personality testing industry a degree of credibility that it does not always deserve. Many of the well established companies who provide personality tests do operate to the highest ethical and professional standards. However, it is inevitable that such a growth industry with low barriers to entry and little official regulation has attracted entrants with varying degrees of competence and integrity.

This situation is made more difficult since most of the companies that produce personality tests are very secretive about their methodologies and refuse to make public crucial information about how their tests were developed or how well they work, claiming that this information is ‘proprietary’. The usefulness and accuracy of even the most well established tests, (for example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator -  first published in 1962 and the subject of thousands of research papers), remain highly controversial among psychologists. For more information on this topic see - Personality Tests - Understanding the Industry .

Why Test Use is Increasing
Despite the controversy surrounding some of these personality tests, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of personality tests over the past ten years or so. The single most frequently given reason for increases in testing is the need to have a selection process which can withstand legal challenges. Increased test use can therefore be seen in part as a defensive strategy, adopted in response to regulation and legislation. Another factor is the ease with which these tests can now be delivered online. This approach has distinct advantages over paper-and-pencil tests:

1. There is no need to print and distribute printed material. This has dramatically lowered the cost of test administration.
2. Results can be processed immediately with no human input. The test administration software can produce very detailed and impressive looking reports. See Example.
3. There has been a growing acceptance of personality testing among the general public. Many people quite happily complete online personality profiles in their own time outside of the recruitment process.
4. There are now more suppliers producing a greater variety of tests. This has driven costs down even further and increased the choice of tests available to recruiting organizations.