Asking the right questions when making your personality test
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Personality tests are an exceptional engagement tool when crafted thoughtfully, and with clear intent.
You can make your hiring process more efficient, gain insightful information on your employees, and more effectively connect your customers’ or audience’s wants and needs to your product or message.
But what’s the key? How do you create a personality test that really reaches your audience and moves the needle on your goals?
It’ll be no surprise to learn that a major factor in producing a successful personality test lies in the questions you ask, and the possible answers you give.
So, whether you’re making a personality test for customer experience campaigns (CX) or human resources (HR), this article is full of practical advice to help you ask the right questions (and provide the “right” answers).
Personality test question best practices for CX
With your CX personality tests, the aims are to deliver a personalised experience which – through the process of self-discovery – connects your audience to your brand, product, or services.
I know what you’re thinking, that’s awfully high minded for something that’s not too dissimilar to one of those Buzzfeed-style “Which Friends Character Are You?” quizzes. But that’s kind of the point.
People enjoy that sort of thing. They don’t owe you their attention so if you want it, you’ve really got to make it fun.
Understand your CX objective before writing your questions
This really all starts, logically, with knowing the objective of your CX campaign.
Why are you making this quiz? What marketing objective does your personality test solve? If, for example, you’re trying to promote a new product, subtly include questions or answers that utilise that product. Think of the personality test like a movie and the mention in the question as being like product placement.
If the goal is to get audience insights or feedback on something, structure some questions that directly ask for said insights.
If you’re looking to enrich your customer data, can you weave questions and answers that will gather some customer preferences? This way you can keep the data collection form shorter and create a personality test with a better chance of having a higher engagement rate.
In all cases, the name of the game is subtlety. It’s got to be fun, so if the questions are “in character” with the game, so to speak, don’t suddenly ask them something in a different tone that might take them out of the experience and highlight that the quiz is not about them, and more about what you need to get from them.
Craft questions that will resonate with your customers
This is hard to explain but you know it when you see it.
If you participate in a Marvel quiz but it includes questions about Superman, the person writing the questions has lost all credibility, and so has the quiz by extension.
If none of the responses are even vaguely the kind of thing you’d do, maybe this brand doesn’t get you.
You need to create these with your audience in mind. Have a focus group to test it on, or at least a large in-house sample size.
Keep things concise and easy to follow
Here’s a key one: remember it’s a fun personality test and not Moby Dick.
Short questions in clear and straightforward language.
No double negatives.
Distinct multiple choice answers for participants to choose from.
If people don’t understand it, they’ll disengage, and won’t complete your personality test.
Personality test question best practices for HR
With your HR personality tests, you’re moving more into the realm of psychometric testing.
This is now less about “entertaining” and redirecting attention, and more about asking questions and providing multiple choice answers which will not only help you inventorise character traits, strengths, and abilities, but also encourage self-reflection in respondents, and encourage them to take ownership of their professional development.
Understand the objective of the HR personality test
In this case, you need to consider if you’re building a personality test to provide an extra feedback in hiring for a specific role, or you’re just looking to get an idea of how to develop your existing workforce and you want some data to understand what you’re working with.
In the case of the former, you’re probably looking to include less questions, and look to get more bang for your buck from each question and each answer. You don’t want to create an unpleasant application process by giving candidates an unnecessarily long personality test.
In the case of the latter, you can be more thorough and more comprehensive, as you have a captive audience and you want to get a more extensive data set of preferences and traits.
Design questions that encourage self-reflection and continuous improvement
This is easier said than done, but every question you create or adapt should be meaningful.
Some people will be able to answer straight away, but where possible, you should be trying to put a thought bubble above the participant’s head.
To adapt a popular thought experiment, imagine buckets for each aspect of your life, and fill them up depending on how well you think you’re doing at them: work, family, friends, fitness, diet, etc.
It’s very difficult to not start filling the buckets and identify areas you need to improve at, and possibly other areas you put too much focus on.
It’s not always possible to hit this level of self-realisation with situational multiple choice, but this is the kind of thing you’re aiming for.
Avoid negative questions or obvious “wrong” or less desirable answers
This one is extremely important: if answers are obviously wrong or less desirable, people might cheat, particularly if this is for recruitment.
You need to make sure your answers are distinct, clearly written, and don’t assign values, so much as reflect a good range of reasonable responses or takeaways.
Pretty much nobody is trying to do a bad job or the wrong thing (or if they are, they’re not going to tell you about it), so to get meaningful results with your personality tests for hiring and HR, give your target audience a modicum of credit.
Key points for writing more effective personality test questions
The range of possibilities with personality tests make it really difficult to put down concrete rules, but the basics, whether it’s for CX or HR, boil down to having clearly explained questions, or posed situations, coupled with distinct answers or possible responses to choose from, written in easy to understand language.
So long as your personality test can be clearly understood by its audience, there is a lot of room for experimentation within the medium.
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