One accurate personality test all recruiters should know about.
Discover the 16 personality types can tell you a whole lot about yourself — and the people you are hiring!
“Hire for attitude — train for skills” is a widely common saying in many successful companies. They don’t just want highly skilled robots, they want real people who can enter a complex cultural environment, or tap into a certain type of team spirit.
Testing skills can be relatively straight forward. You assign a task to a candidate and evaluate on the output this task has generated. Either the candidate has the skills required to solve a problem, or not. Either way, these skills can be developed with a bit of training (in most cases).
But what about attitude?
Unless, attitude is used as a skill, it is much more difficult to train (if not impossible) and you need to take it into consideration when hiring new talent. You can train the “skill” attitude, for example the attitude in regards to how we communicate with our customers, but you can’t train the “personality”. For example how we react to organisational changes or how we tackle new and unexpected challenges.
The point is not to claim that one type of personality is superior another, but to suggest that all personalities are awesome and that finding a candidate that matches your particular team, can be tricky.
Luckily, there are many ways to test personalities. One of them is The Meyers Briggs test, developed by a school teacher in 1944, and another is developed by 16personalites.com.
A school teacher called Cathering Kook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Meyers, created the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator in the early 1940’s. The research was based on the conceptual theory purposed by the famous psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
One of Jung’s key contributions was the development of the concept of Introversion and Extraversion — he theorized that each of us falls into one of these two categories, either focusing on the internal world (Introvert) or the outside world (Extravert). — www.16personalities.com
Besides Introversion and Extraversion, Jung also argues that there are four psychological functions by which us humans experience and percept the world around us — sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking — and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time.
All the different traits can appear in different mixes in people, as well as there are other aspects to take into consideration. But lets keep things simple and imagine that these traits can create different structures and mixes called acronyms, like INTJ-A, ENFP-T, or ESTJ-A.
The website www.16personalities.com provides free tests based on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, but uses a trait-based approach instead of a type-based approach. They have also not incorporated Jungan concepts such as cognitive functions, or their prioritization.
They divide the personality traits into five personality aspects: Mind, Energy, Nature, Tactics and Identity. Combined, they define the personality type.
Each of these aspects should be seen as a two-sided continuum, with the “neutral” option placed in the middle. The percentages you would have seen after completing the test are meant to show which categories you fall under, and how strong your preferences are. — www.16personalities.com
Try it yourself here. You will be surprised on the accuracy and the way the different types of personalities are described.
Which personality type would fit your team the best? Who will you be looking for during your next recruitment process? The Campaigner, the Lobbyist, or maybe the Protagonist?
And maybe most interesting of all…
Which one are you?
//
