Birkman Personality Tests

What is a Birkman test?

The Birkman Personality Test is a psychological assessment that measures an individual’s personality and behaviour. The test is used by businesses, organizations, and individuals to help identify strengths and weaknesses, understand motivation and behaviour, and improve communication and teamwork.

The test was inspired by Dr. Birkman’s time in the US air force, where he noted the differences between how people reacted to situations and training depending on their underlying perceptions and motivations. These factors are broken down into four main categories:

Motivation

Also known as interests, this one is crucial to finding fulfilling and engaging work. Birkman Interests measure your passion for different roles and tasks that are commonly found in the workplace (eg numerical, creative, or persuasive). This can show which tasks you will thrive on and which will drain your energy faster.

Social perception

This is how you perceive and understand the context of the situation you are in, which shapes how comfortable you feel and can help you predict how you might react to a given situation. This is reported as ‘Needs’, since it can help you understand what you need from your workplace in order to feel productive and avoid ‘stress behaviours’. Examples of needs are direct supervision, definitive plans, and feeling accepted by your team.

Self-perception

Reported as ‘usual behaviours’, this assesses how you see yourself and how you feel you approach tasks, manage relationships, and generally contribute to your environment. Usual behaviours are generally learnt from previous experiences that garnered positive results. Essentially, it measures your productivity when your needs are met; such needs could include taking initiative, staying organised, or being competitive.

Stress Behaviours

Your stress behaviours are an indicator of what happens when your needs are not met and how your inefficiency manifests itself. For example, if you do not feel accepted by your team, you may become indecisive, perform tasks slower, and be less likely to use your initiative.

Why do employers use Birkman tests?

Thousands of mid-size and big companies, including Coca-Cola, Shell, and JP Morgan, now use a personality test of some kind in their hiring assessments, and the Birkman test is one of the most common.

From one questionnaire, employers can receive up to forty different reports, which can be used to compare candidates across all the different categories. It can take a Birkman specialist around 1 to 1.5 hours to fully explain all of the results of the questionnaire – so it is a very useful tool for companies looking to improve their hiring process.

Some of the issues that companies use personality tests to address are:

• Improving cognitive diversity
• Reducing employee turnover
• Assisting in mergers and acquisitions
• Leadership/team conflict
• Understanding the relationship between people and performance

By learning how to support employees’ productivity, companies can retain high-performers and address issues of engagement and miscommunications in teams. Personality tests like the Birkman test can deliver impact by identifying the work needs and stress behaviours of employees, making it easier to manage the issues and thus improving productivity.

Personality tests also help to improve your self-awareness, which is a key skill for the modern workplace. By knowing your motivations and behaviours, you can demonstrate an understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses that can help you become better at your job.

Can you prepare for a Birkman test?

It is important to remember that there is no way to fail a personality test, and that being honest when answering is the best technique.

The Birkman test aims to improve diversity in the workplace and encourages employers to put aside stereotypes by understanding how to support all different kinds of people.

However, you can prepare by taking practice personality tests and becoming familiar with the types of questions that you will be asked and reflecting on your answers. Similar personality tests that you can practice are the Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment, which measures four core drivers of behaviour: extroversion, patience, formality, and dominance. Or the McQuaig Word Survey, which goes into more detail and produces a report with ten different areas of interest.

Taking these tests can give you a better idea of your behaviours and motivators, which can help you perform better in interviews and be more reflective in your work.

You can read through our guide on how to answer personality tests for general help with this type of psychometric testing. Though there is no ‘wrong’ answer, they can still be daunting, and it is good to get as much information as possible before taking yours.