What is a personality test and how will it help my business?

Resources

Have you ever wondered why you approach particular challenges one way, while colleagues with very similar educations, and almost cookie cutter life experiences in the grand scheme of humanity, can think you’re mad and suggest and justify an entirely different approach?

The simple answer is they have a completely different personality type. The more challenging answer lies in trying to figure out why, and how the combination of both of you is either great for your team, or a recipe for a bad company culture.

Here’s another question: how do you build relationships with your customers and serve them most appropriately?

Again, the simple answer is that you need to understand their preferences and tendencies as people – in other words, their personality.

Everything we’re talking about here can ultimately be settled – or at least aided, with the use of custom-designed personality tests, but how do you actually test and evaluate what is essentially a person’s very being? Furthermore, how do we do this in a way that helps support and improve organisations across business functions?

This article is a broad examination of how personality tests can be designed and used to support your communications strategies, HR approaches, and even to inform the research and development of your products and services.

What is a personality test?

Essentially, a personality test connects multiple choice answers to a series of questions to a profile or a persona. People answer the questions, and are assigned a profile or persona.

It could be to learn about themselves, as an assessment for work or a job application (like with the MBTI), or just to engage them in targeted messaging.

Personality tests for internal projects

In an internal comms scenario, let’s say you’re trying to assess the types of personalities you have in your team, and you divide them into “decision makers,” “workhorses,” “collaborators,” and “innovators.”

If you ask the question: “Upper management is pushing you to release a new product to market that just isn’t ready yet. What do you do?”

• A. Get the support of your team, articulate your reasoning, and put your foot down on why rushing the product could damage the brand.
• B. Open up a can of elbow grease, make a pot of coffee, and get the job done.
• C. Coordinate with your team to minimise blockers and produce a revised roadmap to deliver ASAP.
• D. Re-evaluate the process, remove unnecessary steps, and deliver on time, rewriting the company handbook in the process.

A is your decision maker, B is your workhorse, C is your collaborator, and D is your innovator (or a red flag to keep an eye on – each case on its merits.)

Of course, this is a wild simplification. Your answers will typically be less black and white, and you’ll have a significant amount of questions answered by a person before a profile is ultimately assigned. (The more serious the implications of the personality test, the more questions will be asked to form a more thorough data set.)

Personality tests for external projects

You could take the same approach externally, either with a psychometric or culture-fit approach to aid your recruitment process, or even in a marketing context.

You could use a personality test for marketing to help segment and build customer profiles, or even just something fun and engaging to promote a new movie or video game – “Which character are you in franchise X?” for example – people’s favourite subjects are typically variations of themselves, so this is a highly effective digital approach to connect target customers to your brand, world, or message.

So you see, personality tests exist across a broad spectrum, assessing things as serious as contributing to the hiring process, to subjects as silly as “What kind of primate are you?” to educate and amuse children at the zoo or the museum.

The history of personality testing

Personality “testing” dates back to the 18th century through phrenology, a pseudoscience where mental traits were predicted by bumps on the skull.

The earliest approach as we’d recognise it today, in the form of a questionnaire, was by the US Army during World War I, when they were trying to identify whose personalities were more likely to suffer from “shell shock.”

While modern personality testing is by no means perfect, and is massively affected by the test being used, it’s a lot better than its predecessors, and is used in far more appropriate ways – and as an additional control and data set, rather than a be-all and end-all hard measurement.

Benefits of personality tests for business

Personality tests can be a useful tool across almost every business function. If you have personnel, or target segments to engage and learn about, then the chances are a bespoke personality test can be designed to further your cause.

We’re going to run through a non-exhaustive list use cases, and explore how personality assessments can be applied.

Improving the hiring process

Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers began constructing their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test (MBTI) during World War II based on the teachings of Carl Jung, believing that knowing their personality preferences would help women entering the workforce for the first time find jobs they would be effective at, and comfortable in.

While that particular personality test has been widely dismissed as pseudoscience and controversial, the fact remains that there are certain traits that benefit any working environment, and there are others which may be unique assets at a specific workplace.

For example, in an office, or in a customer-facing environment, social skills and an affinity for people and interaction will be strengths for any employee, and be qualities employers will look for when hiring.

By contrast, a work from home position, or being a research assistant on a remote outpost will benefit an entirely different sort of person with a completely personality type – one who is more self-sufficient and less gregarious.

A great source of wasted resources in recruitment is when a candidate’s personality doesn’t suit the job and the culture.

Take for example a manager. The specifics of the business aren’t important. They could be too sensitive to work with one team, but not sensitive enough to work with another. It all depends on the culture.

While to some degree you’re limited by what answers a person fills in – they don’t have to answer honestly, afterall – it could give you an insight into whether or not they’re tough enough or kind enough to oversee a specific team or unit, or indicate if they’ll be a good fit, be that through their values, or their approach to specific scenarios.

These tests, in the realm of recruitment, fall into the category of psychometric testing, which also includes ability (job specific knowledge and skills), and aptitude (a person’s innate ability to do something, like generic problem solving or mental arithmetic).

Personality tests and assessments should always be a guide to inform hiring teams, and never carry the most weight in decision making. They exist as a tool to either bring a smaller class of candidates to interview (for efficiency), or confirm the right hire’s been made.

Personality questionnaires for recruitment are a bit like the wrist-based heart rate monitors for sports watches. They can indicate certain things, inform day-to-day planning when they’re tallying with other measures like perception and feel, but they’re not accurate enough to base medical decisions on.

Improving team dynamics

Personality questionnaires are especially useful for assessing and improving team dynamics.

Whether you use something like the DISC profile assessment tool, or a custom built personality test, it’s a great way to audit your team’s approaches to work challenges.

For example, if you notice you’re having a lot of clashes of personality, you may then discover, through assigning personas based on test results, that you have multiple dominant-leader types working in the same team.

Maybe that works for innovation, maybe it doesn’t, but then you know it might serve you to move a few team members around for more harmonious collaboration.

Just going through a personality assessment questionnaire and giving honest, accurate answers encourages employees to reflect on their approach, and why they do the things they do in their working life.

Supporting advancement in leadership roles and career development

Personality tests can also be a useful tool for identifying talent and potential within teams. This is especially useful in large organisations with big teams, where it’s not possible to have a direct working relationship with everyone.

For example, at a large phone bank, you may wish to hire from within, so the future decision makers have experience of the ground floor of your business, but if you have hundreds of operatives, it’s very difficult to identify talent.

It’s not a given that the person who is the best at the phone operative job will be the best manager, so a mix of psychometric assessments gives you another avenue to find the best fit.

It may also be the case that an employee’s “personality” has to adapt to a leadership role for their career, so repeated assessment can be useful to check that they are adopting and cultivating a growth mindset.

Connecting with customers through marketing games

Personality tests also have the advantages for marketing and external communications.

In this context, it’s a way you can connect your brand, product, or your messaging to pretty much everyone’s favourite subject: themselves.

Whether it’s promoting a new video game and asking your audience: “Which hero are you?” or a digital interactive element of an exhibit where you ask visitors: “What would your role be in Ancient Egypt?” you’re connecting the subject matter to their personality.

It’s a bridge to get them onboard, to pay attention, and get them to buy in.

Getting started: Building your own personality tests

For HR and recruitment, there are many established personality tests that exist, but they are generic in the sense that they’re not specific to your industry, nor your company and the role(s) you’re hiring for and the required strengths.

If you want a personality test that’s tailored to your specific needs, you can build one easily using the Drimify gamification platform.

For marketing, it’s a necessity to build or commission your own bespoke personality test, as it needs to conform to your branding and your messaging.

The personality test maker on Drimify is extremely intuitive, and with no experience, you could have a professional-looking personality test – either as a marketing game or as a HR tool – within a morning’s work.

Want to know more?