Perfect Personality Profiles (7 page)

5. Circle the answer that best describes you for each statement.

6. Circle the answer that best describes you for each statement.

7. Which statement in each pair is most like you?

8. For each set of four words choose the one that is most like you and the one that is least like you.

9. For each set of three statements choose the one that is most like you and the one that is least like you.

There are other approaches to measuring personality apart from questionnaires and other psychological tools. The use of the interview to evaluate personality was discussed above and found generally wanting in the hands of most interviewers. However, as a candidate you should be aware that an interviewer may well be looking at your general demeanour and patterns of response to people and situations as well as evidence of your skills, experience and competence that are relevant to the role. In addition to the interview, facets of personality may be assessed through other kinds of exercise. The rest of this chapter reviews the main types of assessment you may meet during recruitment, selection or development activities, which might be being used in part to understand your personality.

Many employers use a variety of interactive exercises in assessment, including various kinds of role play, where the candidate must interact according to a given brief. In a development or promotion context these exercises allow participants to show how they might cope with scenarios outside their current responsibilities. The content is typically relevant to the job or employing organization, but not always. For external candidates for a job, role plays can be designed to provide an opportunity to display behaviours that would be relevant to the job but that do not require specific job or organizational information that someone from outside the organization may not have.

The assessment of the candidate is made by an observer who watches how the candidate goes about the task. Typically, a number of different areas of competence are evaluated. Some of these may relate to skills and abilities, but generally some will be related to personality factors. The competencies to be evaluated will depend on the requirements of the role for which the candidate is applying.

Examples of personality-related factors that might be evaluated include:

• Influencing – did the person influence others to his or her point of view?

• Leadership – did the person tend to take a lead in the discussion, coordinating how the group approached the task?

• Team working – did the person promote team working, encourage quiet group members to participate and allow others to speak?

• Organization – did the person approach the task in an organized manner, consider all the issues, use the time effectively and so on?

• Empathy – did the person show an understanding of the perspective and feelings of other people in the scenario?

Role plays may be one-on-one exercises in which the candidate speaks to an individual with a particular purpose. Examples of individual role play exercises include:

• The candidate plays the role of a customer services officer and talks to a customer who has a complaint. The candidate is required to find out the details of the complaint and resolve it, keeping within company policy but leaving the customer satisfied.

• The candidate is given the role of a sales executive who must introduce the product range to a new client and try to gain an initial order.

• The candidate plays the role of a supervisor who must give feedback to a member of staff who has several performance issues.

• The candidate plays the role of buyer who must try to negotiate a more advantageous contract with a key supplier.

Role plays can also involve more than one person. In a
group exercise
several candidates will be asked to perform a task together. Sometimes all the candidates are provided with the same brief, but sometimes each candidate is given a slightly different brief. In general, the task of the group is to discuss the matter in hand and reach some conclusions on how to deal with it or the next steps to take. In some group exercises one person is appointed the leader, but more often there is no designated leader. Group exercises might include:

• The group play the role of managers in an organization and are asked to make a recommendation on whether to accept a proposal to introduce a new product line to a factory.

• Each group member is given the results of a customer survey and asked to come up with some ideas to address the issues raised in the survey.

• The group are asked to create a recovery plan after one of the organization’s offices was damaged by fire.

• The group are asked to agree a budget for the organization. Each member is briefed about a different department and must argue the case for their department’s needs.

• The group are asked to agree the design and space allocation for some new offices. Each represents a particular section and is briefed about the requirements of their section.

• The group are asked to decide how to use a given budget to purchase equipment to allow them to survive if they were stranded in the Arctic.

As an alternative, or in addition, to role plays, some employers ask candidates to participate in a group activity. As with role play, observers evaluate how the person approaches the task and works with the group. In this case, however, rather than playing a hypothetical role, the candidate is just themself performing the task. This type of activity is more common in assessments for development purposes than assessment for selection or promotion. Remember that what is being assessed is how participants go about the task – for example, do they help each other, can they agree a strategy, do they get on with other group members – rather than how well they complete the assignment. However, the members of a group that fails completely with the assignment probably haven’t performed well.

Examples of tasks might be:

• Agreeing a method to pass a message around the group without speaking or using written notes and successfully using it to transfer messages.

• Making a video to promote a health and safety message.

• Finding materials and making a collage to decorate the staff room.

• Creating a training programme for new staff.

• Using simple equipment to get the team to the other side of the room without touching the floor.

• Building a raft and using it to cross a pond.

• Using planks and ropes to transport some heavy barrels over a high wall.

Some personality traits can be measured by looking at the way people complete simple paper and pencil exercises or computer-based tasks. For instance, a person’s attention to detail can be determined through a task requiring use of this trait, such as colouring in all the o’s in a piece of text. Someone with low attention to detail is likely to miss some of the o’s. This approach to measuring personality is sometimes used in providing careers advice, and it can be useful for measuring a limited range of personality traits. It is called ‘objective’ because rather than asking people to tell you about their personality from their subjective view, the personality information is taken from observing the way they complete a task, and in that sense it is completely objective.

Another type of exercise that is used to elicit a person’s behavioural style is called a situational judgement test. In this type of exercise the candidate is presented with a hypothetical situation and asked to choose the option that best reflects how they would respond. These exercises are quite versatile and can be used to measure many things apart from personality traits, but they provide some indication of how a person might behave in a particular situation or how they think it would be appropriate to behave. Situational judgement tests are more likely to be used to measure competencies (see Chapter 4) than pure personality.

These questions may ask you what you
would
do in a particular situation. Some situational judgement test questions focus on what you
should
do – that is, what is the right thing to do in a particular situation – and they are, therefore, less about how you would behave and more about your understanding of what is the correct thing to do. Some questions ask you to choose one best answer. Other formats might ask you to mark the best and worst answers or to rank all the answers from best to worst. Alternatively, you might be asked to rate the answers according to how effective they are.

Some situational judgement test questions have a clear correct answer. More often the best answer will depend on the context. For instance, in the first example below some organizations might prefer people who would speak to John directly. A more hierarchical organization might prefer someone who would refer the matter to a manager. Some situational judgement tests measure personality using options that reflect different personality styles. The third example below is like this. Options 1 and 2 suggest a more people-focused management style, whereas 3 and 4 are typical of a more task-focused one.