Though it’s not the most common weapon used to weed through prospective employees, personality tests can be a great tool in profiling an individual, gathering their core values, and helping decide whether or not that person is a good fit for the company. These exams are a sort of comprehensive questionnaire and can help reveal an individual’s character and makeup. Although popular in a variety of professions, like relationship counseling and the military, the most widespread use today is for employee selection.
There is an issue with this strategy, as candidates will be apt to answer the questions in a way that will -distort the results. This may craft an ideal but false character and set of traits for the position. Luckily, there have been several schemes put into place to circumvent these “fake” answers. The more ingenious of which is baked directly into the questions themselves.
Today, companies are using personality tests in conjunction with face-to-face interviews to best gauge an individual’s psychological profile. Beyond determining an individual as an extrovert or introvert, these questions, which can number several hundred strong on some exams, attempt to grab a person’s core ideals and what makes them successful. Most professionals agree that these evaluations can be a better portrayal of a candidate and whether they’ll be a good fit for the company than the typical interview.
In most situations, these exams will be given to numerous applicants, but with small variations as the employer will be looking for specific traits in an individual. A company may be hiring for different and contrasting positions, so different results will hopefully be tailor-fit to their respective fields.
