Personality Tests

What is a personality test for recruitment?

Used across an increasingly varied range of sectors, personality tests have been designed to assess many of the traits and competencies employers typically value.

Your ability to build relationships, your ethics, how you take instruction and how you deal with customers are just some of the things personality tests seek to understand through a series of multiple-choice questions.

The test will normally always be tailored to the job or industry you’re applying for, and the questions will be designed to evaluate competencies that are important for your employer to see in you.

Unlike more traditional aptitude tests, personality tests don’t tend to have a time limit. This allows you to answer in your own time and not feel rushed to put down an answer.

While it’s important to think about the values, competencies and skills that an employer is likely to be looking for and apply that in the test, it’s also important to be honest. If you’re not true to your own values, then you could end up in a job that’s totally unsuitable for you.

Don’t be surprised if you notice that many of the questions feel repetitive. In order to score candidates as accurately as possible, each trait being tested is assessed by asking multiple questions relating to it. This helps make the test more reliable, as it captures the breadth of the trait being measured.

How are personality tests used by employers?

Recruitment personality questionnaires typically assess a number of traits or competencies in their broadest sense, before breaking these down into more specific means of analysing your personality.

Hiring employers want to get to know as much as possible about the pool of candidates in front of them, which is why a personality test is never used in isolation. It’s designed to bring your values and traits to light, but it doesn’t touch so much on your skills and past experience.

They are, however, occasionally used as a means of shortlisting a large pool of candidates.

If, for example, an employer wants to see how well you’re likely to work in a team, they can evaluate how you performed at your assessment centre to form an educated opinion. A personality test would have brought some of this information to light, but when combined with your role play, interview and group exercises and plotted on an assessment matrix, the employer now has a robust and accurate picture of your ability to work with others.

Often, an employer will ask you to take a personality test online, prior to an interview or assessment centre. Your results can then shape the questions they ask you or the things they challenge you on when they meet you in person.

Another reason why it’s good to prepare, but remember to be true to yourself in your answers too.

While there aren’t technically any right or wrong answers in a personality test, there are traits that are more desirable to some employers than others. For example, in a sales role you’d be expected to score highly in your ability to communicate with others and be sociable, but this won’t be as important in roles that are more analytical, such as data analysis.

We all know that our competencies will be scrutinised throughout the recruitment process, and a personality test is just another means of doing so.

How are personality tests scored?

When your test is completed, your score will be compared with a normative group. This comparison group is made up of hundreds or even thousands of people who have taken the test before, and it helps an employer to benchmark you against others across the different traits being assessed.

But it’s not quite as simple as that. Scoring the personality test involves a machine reading your ‘raw score’ for each trait you’re being tested on.

More often than not sten scoring is used. Sten scores lie on a scale of 1 to 10, with the mean at 5.5. So if you score a 5 or a 6 that’s likely to be indicative of the normative group, but a 1 or 10 would be a more extreme score.

The traits you are tested on may vary slightly from test to test, but will normally be variations of:

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

These are the broad traits that are then broken down further to help employers explore specific competencies.

The role you’re applying for will require you to possess certain characteristics. So as we’ve said, technically there are no right or wrong answers – but there are certainly things employers are looking for.

For example, if you’re applying for a customer-facing role and you answer questions indicating you don’t like working with people, that could be a problem.

Free example personality test questions

Trying out some different personality test questions is a really good way to prepare for an upcoming personality test.

The more familiar you are with the different question formats and the wording of the questions themselves, the easier you’ll find it to answer in a way that best reflects you as a person and a valuable employee.

Try a free personality test here.

Can (and should) you prepare for personality tests?

When taking any test, preparation is always recommended — and a personality test is no different.

First, try to get as much information as you can on the type of test you’ll be taking. As you’ll be aware from reading this article, there are a huge variety of test providers, and many ways in which the questions can be asked.

Familiarising yourself with the type of test you’ll be taking is a good idea as it will help to remove any nervousness you may be feeling, and ensure you can concentrate on answering the questions honestly and well. We’ve got an article on how to answer personality test questions if you’re unsure, as well as lots of tips for personality tests.

It’s also important to research and use educated guesswork when thinking about the skills, strengths and traits the role and the company you’re applying for are likely to value. This information can help you shape your answers, and is important to keep in mind when you work through the questions.

Just like with aptitude tests, the best way to prepare for a personality test is to work through mock tests and familiarise yourself with the way the questions read and what you understand each one to mean.

Looking at your results is also a good idea, since it gives you an indication of your personality traits, and how your results are likely to be regarded by an employer.