Personality test

The average length of time of a normal interview is between 45 minutes and an hour. When interviews travel beyond this time, usually there is something interesting that may have come up which the interviewers need to clear.

Even where the subject responsible for an interview going beyond the usual period is relevant to the job at stake, a lot cannot be said to be achieved during the course of a brief encounter as is traditional of a job screening.

When you consider the main subjects that come up for consideration in a job interview session, you will realise that even if an interview lasts a 180 minutes, it is still difficult to claim that all relevant subjects have been exhaustively dealt with.

In this brief write-up, the interest of the author does not lie in an in-depth discussion of all the major themes that come up for consideration by an intelligent HR manager. But, however little your time is and no matter how time pressed you are, when you are hunting for talents for your company, be sure to cover at least three subjects in the list that follows: general questions, job related discussions, goals and motivation, education, job performance attitudes and personality or behaviour orientation. Personality and behaviour oriented tests are increasingly becoming very relevant these days as markets are quickly globalising and customers are on their match to greater sophistication almost by the day.

From the young and old and very academic who will run the R&D department of the company to those whose responsibilities include dealing directly with the client, a certain behavioural pattern may be desirable for one position but same personality predisposition may be seen as awkward when being evaluated for another position in the same establishment.

The jobseeker with the personality type with high score on the extraversion scale is likely to be warm hearted, chitty-chatty, high spirited and optimistic. As much as qualities such as these may be highly prized in “people departments” in an establishment, in another facet of the business, a generous score such as this is a hindrance to productivity in the laboratory of the company where research and products developments take place.

Generally, five factors have been used traditionally for the test of a subject’s personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Whatever use the result of the tests is going to be put to is often not as relevant as the test itself because this test now has a wide range of uses in public as well as large multinationals and even small institutions. Premium colleges are using the test to determine which students should be encouraged to peruse certain courses because of the latter’s vast requirements for persons with certain predispositions.

When you shortlist jobseekers for a forthcoming interview, you would not be demanding too much of the candidates when you send them an SMS or WhatsApp them a link where they can do a personality test and forward the results to you via a secure electronic mail for consideration.

If that will be too much for you, you may want to consider taking the first few minutes of the interview time to ask them to take this test. In that case, you need to set up temporary workstations for the candidates and be sure these workstations have swift internet connectivity.

An in-house test of personality has a lot more predictive value than one where the test taker does his own thing and sends you results that you have to depend on in order to make very important decisions.

Because, as it turns out usually, candidates who chose from the pool of alternative answers the ones that appeal to them, rather than the ones that readily would have been closest to their course of action, tend to receive the test results of another person.

But where you are using the result of the test as a preliminary elimination tool, you can buy the right for as many prospects as you have shortlisted and forward them the link via any appropriate electronic means. Usually, for such private arrangements, as soon as the candidate is done, the test results are automatically forwarded to you for analysis.

Job prospects whose scores are high on openness to experience usually appreciate arts, connect emotionally, love adventure, are full of ideas and tend to be curious. Their intellectual curiosity may lead to creativity and independence. But the most important indicator for career purposes is that because of their love for diversity, they tend not to excel at tasks that are routine in nature.

A high conscientiousness score reveals a tendency to be organised, disciplines and dependable. Subjects who score high on this factor are dutiful but prefer to work in a planned, schematic environment and may be frustrated by tasks whose activities cannot be planned way ahead of time.

Candidates with a good score on the agreeableness factor tend to be cooperative, friendly and companionate. This factor is also used in measuring a subject’s temper and may, therefore, give the recruiter a glimpse of the temperamental nature of the candidate.

Jobseekers with good scores on this factor grow to become good leaders who can negotiate even an unlikely business deal. Their un-antagonistic nature makes way for trust building and avoidance of hard feelings. A good score on the neuroticism scale is a bad omen. Subject with high score have a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions. GB