We don’t mean to alarm you with the title, we’re sure you’re nice; and your personality has rave reviews.
This said, not all personality types are a fit for all work environments. That’s why we’re showing you, below, the type of personality tests your prospective employer may use as a tool to vet whether you are the right fit for their team or not.
Personality Test Types – What to Know
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
Background & How it Works
Often referred to as MBTI, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality test inspired from the teachings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who speculated that human beings universally experience the world using our sensory perceptions of sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking and the test itself was produced by a mother and daughter – Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Briggs.
The MBTI test is a tool that determines which four groupings, derived from Jung’s theories, an individual falls under:
extraversion vs. Introversion,
judging vs. Perceiving,
intuition vs. Sensing, and,
thinking vs. Feeling.8
After taking a 20-to-40-minute test online, for free, your answers will then funnel through the four groupings and place you as one of the possible 16 possible personality type categories (outcomes/combinations of the four groupings).
DISC Test
Background & How it Works
As stated on its site, “Simply put DISC is a personal development model that helps people understand why they do what they do! In that regard, it is a framework that brings individual preferences and tendencies to light. In so doing, it also identifies patterns of behavior that might seem at first glance to be foreign, unfamiliar or even contrary.”
70% of Fortune 500 businesses use DISC profiles, for example: Exxon, General Electric, and Walmart. The motivation for their incorporation of the test into hiring and retention processes can be categorized by the aims of the test itself: to train without judgement, to manage more effectively, to make conflict more productive, to improve teamwork, and to raise self-awareness (of employees, teams, and the employer).
DISC stands for:
Dominance
Influence
Steadiness
Conscientiousness
Taking a DISC test is usually an offering that the prospective or current employer you work with has bought into. This said, once you do take the test you will answer a variety of questions to assess where you land most strongly within its allotted types D-C.
People with D (Dominance) personalities - confident and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results.
People with i (Influence) personalities – more open and place an emphasis on relationships and influencing or persuading others.
People with S (Steadiness) personalities - dependable and place the emphasis on cooperation and sincerity.
People with C (Conscientiousness) personalities - place the emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency.
The Eysenck Personality Test
Background & How it Works
This test reflects the ideas of Hans Eysenck and Sybil B. G. Eysenck, researchers on personality devoted to statistical analysis, inspired by an ancient Greek personality system, and convinced that personalities were defined by three things:
Extroversion,
Neuroticism, and,
Psychoticism.
Taking this test means that you partake in the EQ (Eysenck Questionnaire) and that your answers are then measured by the EPI (Eysenck Personality Inventory).
To be honest, the way that this test populates your proposed ‘personality type’ has been questioned, criticized, revised (in ‘85), and is still slightly complicated to explain. Fundamentally, what we’re looking at here is a short or long version of the Eysenck Personality test ranging between 48 (short) and 100 (long) Yes/No questions that place you on a continuum of the above three personality types and label your as ‘stable’ or ‘unstable’. Slightly harsh, right?
The Caliper Profile
Background & How it Works
According to its site, on Talogy (previously psi caliber), “The Caliper Profile is an objective assessment that accurately measures an individual’s personality characteristics and individual motivations in order to predict on-the-job behaviors and potential. Scientifically validated by nearly 6 decades of research, the Caliper Profile measures 22 robust traits and offers local norms for several countries. The assessment data can be utilized throughout the employee lifecycle including selection, development, promotion, team building, and succession planning.
To-date this personality test has profiled 4.5 million, been used by 65.4 million companies (whhhatttt???!!!) and operates 46.7 thousand consultations annually.
Your prospective employer might ask you to take the Caliper Profile. Once you complete the questions asked from the profile, your results are measured against one+ validated job models and the managers hiring for the roles can then see how suitable you are for your hopeful role or not. This info (or data) collected can then also be used in-future to support your onboarding and development within the organization.
So, I guess it's kind of a big deal.
An important thing to remember: It’s a good thing to know if you are compatible with a team or work environment before you get started so as weird as it can feel to be assessed personality-wise by, well, a computer program, the results can help all involved. It's better to know before you get started if the fit is right or wrong.