How to Use Personality Tests for Your Career

Alice Berg
The Startup
Published in
5 min readMay 15, 2019

Having an in-depth understanding of yourself is essential in ensuring that you find a job, work environment, and company that allows you to grow. Comprehending your attributes, for example, emotional intelligence, communication style, working style, weaknesses, and strengths will go a long way in helping you determine the right career path. So, how can you learn more about yourself? By taking a personality test.

This article reveals why you should take an in-depth personality test, how the quiz will help your career and some examples of excellent tests. Plus, it highlights what you need to do after taking your personality test.

Why You Should Take a Career Personality Test

By taking a personality test, you will discover new things about yourself that you were not familiar with before. See, given that we are human, it is not always easy to see ourselves objectively. For this reason, we rely on personality tests to provide us with unbiased deductions about our passions, hidden skills, and behaviors.

Apart from that, most recruiters today are using personality tests for hiring. Of late, employers have become quite keen on culture fit, and thus, the personalities of employees have gained much significance. Recruiters are now interested in hiring applicants that possess the right personalities for the roles they are offering in addition to excellent hard skill set and experience.

When you familiarize yourself with personality tests, you know what to expect when they come up during your job search. But even with that said, you need to be careful not to provide the answers you think the recruiter wants to hear for this is a sure way of getting yourself into a company that is not right for you.

How a Job Personality Test Benefits Your Career

You can do a lot of things with the information you get from a personality test. For instance, you can:

· Know the career paths that match your interests and personality

Taking job quizzes based on personality help you to determine the opportunities that suit your creativity and initiatives. As a result, you are always guaranteed with work that is right for you.

· Learn about your strengths

Psychological tests for employees enable you to determine your strengths thereby helping you to navigate your job search or career effectively. Apart from that, knowing about your strong suits allows you to discover answers for this common interview question “What are your strengths?”

· Discover your weaknesses

Personality tests uncover your weaknesses. In turn, they help you learn what you need to improve on to ensure promotions and professional growth.

· Comprehend your work style

By taking a personality test, you understand how you work with others and your employer. With this information, you will get yourself into the right work environment that, in turn, maximizes your productivity.

· Determine your communication style

Personality tests enable you to understand your communication style. If there is a need, you will make the necessary improvements to ensure that you work with your employer as well as colleagues effectively.

Examples of Personality Test for Jobs

Do you want to know what career you are best suited for? Or maybe you want to understand who you are personally. Are you a natural leader? These personality and career tests can answer all these questions:

1. Myer-Briggs Type Indicator

The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator is a common self-test designed to show your personality type, preferences, and strengths. The test was created by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers and is based on Carl Jung’s personality types. Using four psychological areas: intuition, feeling, sensation, and thinking, it’s a great personality test for job fit especially if you don’t know what career to pursue as it tells you what job best matches your personality.

2. O-Net Interest Profiler

The O-Net Interest Profiler helps you to discover where your interests lie and where they fit in the professional world. This test suggests several job options you may like to explore whether you are a fresh graduate or making a career transition by measuring six different types of interests: social, realistic, investigative, artistic, conventional and enterprising.

3. MAPP Career Assessment

Known in full as Motivational Appraisal Personal Potential, MAPP test is wonderful for working professionals, students, graduates, or any person looking for fresh job ideas. The 22 minutes quiz matches you to more than 1000 real careers that fit your profile.

4. DISC

DISC is a short test that gives you sixteen questions for you to analyze. You then answer how strongly you agree or disagree with them. It assesses Influence, Dominance, Compliance, and Steadiness levels in your personality.

5. Jungian Personality Test

This multiple choice personality test is based on Myer-Briggs. It presents statements and asks you to choose if you disagree, somewhat agree or agree with them then matches you with one of the 16 MBTI personality types.

6. Emotional Intelligence Quiz

This free test asks to look at statements about yourself, analyze and reflect on tough feedback you may have received in previous months and so on, then after the quiz, gives you results on your emotional intelligence ranging from low to high.

7. The Big Five Personality Test

This test is a free psychological assessment that measures five personality factors: openness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Each personality test question assesses your strongest traits and tells you which jobs would fit your personality and which would not.

8. Leadership Style Test

Created by Psychology Today, this test tells you whether you have what it takes to become a leader. Using a series of questions and statements, it assesses if you have the skills and personality traits that make up a good leader. In the results, you get a summary of your leadership style plus strengths and weaknesses.

What to Do After You Take Personality Test

After taking a personality or work style assessment test, reflect on the results you have received to see where you need to improve on. You can also discuss the results with your boss or colleague or think about how you can use the insights in your career.

Taking these interactive personality quizzes can help you carve out the ideal career path, find the best skills to put in your resume for better job prospects, or advance in your current job.

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Alice Berg
The Startup

Blogger from Bath, who received a degree in Social Work and Applied Social Studies. Now helps people to find their own way in life and gives career advice.