Personality assessment
A personality assessment or test shares insights into respondents’ personality profiles. It provides information about their characteristics and how to navigate their social and professional lives with their given personalities.
Use a personality assessment to:
- Provide helpful information for businesses to better understand their employees’ traits.
- Understand your strengths and areas of improvement to connect with your team and find success in your role.
- Give immediate feedback to the assessment taker with a personalized PDF report
What is a personality assessment?
Have you ever wondered why you are the way you are? Personality assessments will give you a better grasp on what it means to be you as well as how you think, feel and interpret the world. Perhaps most importantly, these assessments shed light on why you are the way you are and how that can use your qualities to your advantage in the world. Many workplaces now distribute various forms of personality assessments in order for the leadership to better understand their teams.
Popular examples of these assessments include the Myers-Briggs test, the Big Five personality test and Enneagram test.
The Myers-Briggs personality test uses four dichotomies – extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving – to group participants into one of 16 different personality types. The Enneagram assessment sorts participants into one of nine personality types based on their differences in thinking, handling and feeling. The Big Five personality test scores respondents high, low or somewhere between based on five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
One important note about all personality assessments – there are no incorrect answers, and there certainly are no “right” or “wrong” personality types. Everyone has their own unique qualities, and that’s what makes you, well, you! The goal of these tests is to provide insights and understanding into who you are so you can thrive in the workplace and in life in general.
Why use Pointerpro as a personality assessment tool?
Why use Pointerpro as a personality assessment tool?
Comprehensive reports
Send personalized content in the shape of a comprehensive PDF report to the respondent.
White label option
This feature removes the Pointerpro branding on your tests so you can use your own logos, URLs, branded reports and more.
Zapier integration
Use Zapier to automatically transfer all data from the personality assessment to all your favorite tools and apps.
Personality assessment questions
There are several types of personality tests and personality test questions used by employers to measure the ‘personality fit’ of job seekers. Most personality test types fit into 3 groups:
Statement-based personality test questions
The most common type of personality test questions is statement-based ones. In this type of question, you receive a list of statements and are asked to state the extent to which you agree or disagree with each statement.
For example, you might receive the following statement: ‘I am confident that work accidents won’t happen to me’. You will then be asked to state the extent to which you agree with this statement on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is ‘strongly disagree’, and 5 is ‘strongly agree’.
Forced-choice personality test questions
This type of personality test question is somewhat less common than the statement-based one. In this type of question, you receive a list of 3 or 4 adjectives or statements. You are then asked to rank them from the one that is the most like you to the one that is the least like you.
For example, you might receive the following 3 adjectives: ‘friendly’, ‘careful’ and ‘responsible’. The challenge of this type of question is that sometimes all adjectives are equally desirable for the job you are applying for.
Open-ended personality test questions
This type of personality test question is less common, but it still important to be aware of it in case your personality test has such questions. In this type, you will have a list of open personality-based questions trying to measure your tendencies and preferences based on your written response.
For example, you could be asked: ‘If I were to ask some of your good friends, how would they describe your social skills?
- Please score the following statement on a scale of 0 (not relevant) to 10 (highly relevant): I enjoy new experiences.
- When working in a group, do you usually take the lead or perfer to follow along with the rest of the team?
- Would you rather work with a group of people or individually?
- True or false: An organized desk is important for your work process.
- Would you consider yourself a patient person?
- Do you prefer more creative or analytical projects?
Advantages of personality tests
- If taken before an interview, personality tests help in narrowing the selection of candidates, as it gives an insight into the characters of all applicants and helps employers decide which respondents should be invited for an interview.
- The test can also aid in helping managers decide which questions they should ask the candidate when they do come for an interview.
- With only having a limited amount of time in an interview, candidate skills and abilities can often be overlooked on a CV or face-to-face, however, a personality test offers a deeper insight into how they might fit into a company work culture.
- There is often a lower turnover of staff within a company if applicants have traits similar to the rest of the workforce.
- Personality tests usually detect interpersonal characteristics that may be required for some jobs.
Disadvantages of personality tests
- Some personality assessments can take a lot of time and effort to complete, which may dissuade a potential candidate from going further with the application process. Don’t ask an excessive amount of questions and limit yourself to the amount of questions you need to get the full picture of someone personality.
- An applicant’s experience and training may conflict with the results of the test, and therefore make it more difficult for a manager to decide how to proceed.
- More often than not, applicants answer personality tests based on pleasing the interviewer or by what is socially acceptable, which discredits the test. Remain critical of the results.
- Personality tests can be expensive, from paying for the tests to paying someone to score the tests. This needs to be weighed against the likelihood that the right candidate will be offered the job.
- Even if an applicant answers the personality test perfectly, this does not mean that they are the right fit for the job and will carry through with the same efficiency if they are offered a role within the company. Do not solely use a personality test to hire employees.
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