Navigating Pre Employment Personality Profiles
To reduce company turnover, many companies are turning to personality profiling as a pre employment tool. In the pre interview selection process, you may encounter any of several dozen different types of personality profiling tests. What all these pre employment personality tests have in common is the desire to match new hires with available jobs as well as possible.
What is the employer looking for?
Personality tests are designed to identify your work personality profile based on target attributes, such asDiSC's dominance/driver, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness/compliancy. The employer is looking for how well the personality profile matches the advertised job opening.
Several types of tests can automatically compare your target attributes to generic or customized job templates for the advertised job. A few, such asProfile XT, are able to compare your personality profile directly to those of high-functioning employees in similar positions who have been working with the company for years.
What does a personality profile measure?
Nearly all personality tests assess thinking and reasoning styles. For example, a personality profile may describe a person's dominant thinking style as intuitive or logical. Some people plan out a route every step of the way before setting out. Others are satisfied with knowing the general direction and outline. Still others may not preplan a destination at all.
A few personality tests will also assess occupational interests in a general way. For example, the test may ask if you prefer working on the overall design or filling in the details. There are usually also questions about whether you prefer to work alone or on a team, but this is more about behavioral traits than occupational interests.
Most personality profiles include behavioral traits. The most obvious of these is personal morality. True-false statements such as "It's OK to take home supplies you use at work" are clearly assessing the likelihood that you will do the same to your employer.
On the other hand, test designers are aware that peoplelie during personality tests when a potential job is at stake. For this reason, they design their tests to catch extremes which don't tend to happen naturally.
For example, extreme, perfect honesty is almost unheard of. Very few people would honestly agree strongly with scaled statements such as "I have never been untruthful, even to save someone's feelings." Questions such as these may be an internal check on the test-taker's honesty. A well-designed interview will follow up on flagged questions to see whether the person was lying on the test or is really that honest.
How do I answer correctly?
You may have heard that there is no right or wrong answer on a personality test. This is true, in a way. Personality has a wide healthy range, and jobs that will perfectly suit with some personalities may not fit at all with others. Most companies have jobs to suit most people who are willing to work.
However, all a company's jobs are almost never open at the same time. Some personality traits will fit the requirements for an advertised job better than others. At the same time, the company may also have other jobs in the wings which you don't know about yet, which may work best with different personality traits.
You may also be wrong about the traits the company is looking for. For example, many employment websites advise you to make yourself look like an extrovert when answering personality test questions, but extreme extroverts are associated with high job turnover as well as leadership. If you try to tailor your answers to what you think the employer is looking for, you may end up profiling yourself out of a potential job.
Your best bet is to answer honestly on the personality test. At the same time, make sure you apply only for those jobs which would be a good fit for you and where you think you are able to do a good job. That way, your personality test results are most likely to match what the employer is looking for.
