The companies that produce personality tests and the
human resources staff who use them invariably refer to these tests
as personality ‘questionnaires’ rather than ‘tests’. This is done
to avoid giving the impression that there are right and wrong
answers and that the test can be either passed or failed.
Obviously, no one type of personality is necessarily better or
worse than any other. However, remember that you are being given
this test for a reason, the employer is plainly looking for
something otherwise they would not be wasting time and money on
the testing process.
It is worth taking a few steps back and looking at the
selection process objectively. What is the recruiting organization
trying to achieve? In simple terms, having received tens or
hundreds of applications for a job, they are faced with the
considerable task of rejecting all but one of them. Most
applicants are rejected on the basis of their resume, but this
will usually leave about 10 or so who need to be rejected for
other reasons.
Looking at the recruitment process like this makes a lot of people
uncomfortable – the idea of lots of losers and only one winner
makes the whole thing seem brutally competitive. And of course it
is. A medium sized organization may need to fill several job
vacancies every week and this means that lots of applicants need
to be screened and nearly all of them rejected, without the whole
process costing too much in terms of cash and manpower. In the
context of selection, personality questionnaires are just another
hurdle that you need to get over to get the job.
Lack of Good Advice
It is interesting to see how little real advice there is, either
in books or on the web, about how to approach the personality
questionnaires used in selection. For example, most of the job
sites on the internet have several pages of advice for job-seekers
on how to prepare their resume or how to answer ‘tough’ interview
questions. However, when it comes to preparing yourself for a
personality test, the advice is usually limited to ‘just be
yourself’. This is a very inconsistent position to take. After
all, if you’re going to spend considerable time and effort
preparing your resume and preparing for the interview, then why
not prepare yourself for the personality questionnaire?
To understand where this ‘just be yourself’ advice comes from
it is necessary to look at where these job sites get their content
from. The advice that these sites do give is usually little more
than a reworking of material that can be found on their
competitor’s web sites or in any one of dozens of books on these
topics. Much of it is written by professional copywriters who may
not have much interest in the recruitment and selection industry.
This shouldn’t be surprising, job sites make their money by
putting numbers of candidates forward, not by successfully getting
individual candidates jobs. They are not experts in the workings
of the selection process, but they do feel as though they should
have some advice on their web sites to bring in traffic and to add
some credibility.
Another reason for the ‘just be yourself’ advice is because the
test suppliers have been very successful in getting across the
message that these tests are so sophisticated that you cannot
influence your result without being ‘caught’. This is a case of
‘sales talk’ becoming accepted wisdom because it is being repeated
again and again by every company that produces tests. This is
after all a very competitive industry and every company selling
these tests must push the message that their test is 100% reliable
if they are going to stay in business.
Approaches to the Personality Questionnaire
There are three approaches that you can take to the
personality questionnaire. You can either be totally honest and
make no attempt to influence the outcome, you can try to determine
what characteristics you think the employer is looking for and try
to ‘fake’ the test accordingly or you can learn enough about how
these tests work so that you can be honest whilst ensuring that
you don’t blow your chances because one aspect of your personality
comes over as too extreme or inappropriate.
The idea of making any attempt to influence your personality
profile may be difficult for some people to accept. Many people
within HR and the companies that sell the tests would agree. They
see personality profiling as an academic exercise which you should
submit to without question. It’s up to you to decide which option
to take. You can either; turn up and ‘just be yourself’, take the
tests and hope for the best or you can invest a little time and
effort to understand how these tests work, and what you need to do
to make sure that you’re not unfairly rejected.
Before you make your decision, you need to understand what it is
that the tests try to measure, how they measure it and how the
employer uses this information. The topic is further complicated
in that there is very little consensus outside of the personality
test industry about how accurate some of these tests really are,
compared to aptitude tests or the tests used in assessment
centers. This is one area where you really do have to make your
own decision.
How
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Everything you need to pass
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