Rachael Cox takes a psychometric personality assessment and discovers her ideal job ...

Recruiting the wrong person is a huge financial burden: British companies are wasting more than £12 billion a year on recruitment mistakes. It also has a negative impact on business performance, if you take into account the amount of time managers spend addressing issues caused by the poor performance of employees ill-suited to the job.

Recruitment mistakes can also lead to short or long-term absenteeism due to stress. According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) more than 166 million working days are lost to absenteeism every year. The problem is so bad that the CBI believes absenteeism is the main reason why UK productivity lags behind the US and some parts of Europe.

Therefore it's vital to recruit the right person, but how do you tell if a person is right for the job just by looking at their CV? Even interviews don't always reveal personality traits or working preferences.

So how can you make the process more effective? Recruitment specialists Global Highland in Inverness invited me to take a personality assessment to tind out first hand. Global Highland is moving away from the traditional recruitment agency model towards being employment specialists with added services, and now offers this form of personality assessment as part of its employee search, recruitment and development service.

Operations Director, lain MacGregor, explained: "CVs tell us about qualifications, skills and previous experience, but to recruit the best person for a specific job you really need to find out what sort of person they are, and what sort of working environment they are best suited to. Personality assessments help us discover behavioural characteristics and how the candidate would complement existing team members."

Global Highland also uses this form of occupational psychology as a development tool for team analysis and team building. Mr MacGregor added, "Working with teams, we can analyse all the profiles and see if they fit together. It's not always about recruiting more people, it's about making sure the people you have are working at their best together."

I was a little nervous about completing the online questionnaire. I didn't want to be pigeonholed by a computer, and I was rather worried about what it would reveal- perhaps something I didn't like. It consisted of 140 questions and took around 50 minutes to complete. The questions did not ask whether I could or could not do certain tasks, but whether I enjoyed or preferred certain tasks compared to others.  From a choice of four options I had to rate the least and most like me in a work situation. I realised it was important to consider the choices in a work situation, as I would have answered some of the questions differently if it was about me in a social situation.  For example, the option "I like to be around people”: I do outside work, but when I am working I prefer to be left alone to get o with it! I was worried this would make me sound very antisocial, which I’m not.

I also found I wanted to explain myself, rather than just clicking a button.  For example: “I am talkative” – usually I am, but not at work when there is lots to get done; and “I am lively in groups” – it depends on the group and the situation.

Some options were an easy choice:

·          I am an optimist – most like me

·          I like statistical analysis – least like me

However some, some were more difficult, and I found it problematic when I felt all four statements I was supposed to choose from applied to me

For example:

·          I find intellectual people stimulating

·          I enjoy creating solutions

·          I am considerate

·          I dislike competitive work

The problem was that I agreed with all the statements, and it was difficult for me to rank them most and least like me.  By the end of the assessment, I really wasn’t sure what it would reveal about me.

Following the test, I returned to Global Highland for my feedback interview.  To reflect a real recruitment situation, and to demonstrate what a personality assessment can reveal about at candidate, I was interviewed for three different media roles.   Mr MacGregor explained, " Although you have an excellent CV and portfolio, and could easily do a number of jobs in your field, I need to find out more about you to determine exactly which job you are best suited to. If there is nothing to distinguish a candidate from the others in terms of skills and experience, I need to analyse the personality assessment to gain the level of detail necessary for selection."  The three jobs Mr MacGregor had in mind throughout our discussion were:

·          Editor of a magazine

·          Columnist for a magazine or newspaper

·          PR consultant

The three core areas assessed by the questionnaire were relationships with people; thinking style; and feelings and emotions. Within these broad categories, 32 different personality characteristics were revealed, all of which I felt represented an accurate picture of my working persona.

Looking at my thinking style, Mr MacGregor noted that my preference for" data rational" work was fairly low, suggesting an interest in dealing with opinions and feelings rather than facts and figures. He added, "From this, a trained consultant would get the impression that you would not particularly enjoy a job which involved analysing statistical information, even though you may be quite capable of doing it."   The questionnaire also revealed other accurate insights into my thinking style, indicating I am detail conscious, persistent until the job is done, strategic and forward thinking, organised and systematic.

However, these characteristics were combined with a creative mind set, variety seeking, adaptable and conceptual. With this in mind, Mr MacGregor ruled me out of the columnist job, as it would be too restrictive and I would probably feel there was not enough variety in the role.

This combination of preferences surprised Mr MacGregor, who said, HI've never seen a candidate so detail conscious and innovative at the same time. Usually people who are way off the scale when it come.s to details are often numerical, statistical, rule-following and conventional- it's unusual to have the tendency for creativity and variety as well. 

I explained I had to do both in different situations in my current job, and I lilced both the variety and creativity of devising and writing features, and the satisfaction of getting the task complete, checking every detail and meeting strict deadlines.

In the" relationships with people" category, I felt I had to explain my answers, because I remembered I was very negative about being around people. Mr MacGregor stressed this is why it is important to take the test thinking about your work personality, not your home personality. I was worried the test would not pick up on the fact that I am socially confident, but not always outspoken.

As I suspected, the feedback suggested I was comfortable spending time away from people and I value my time alone. It also showed that I am not confrontational and do not enjoy being persuasive in a work situation.

Mr MacGregor said this would indicated I would not be suited to a sales role, and in a real interview situation, this would trigger the consultant to rule me out of a job that involved sales or persuading people to buy a product or service. In this situation, Mr MacGregor felt I would not be suitable for the PR consultant position: while it does involve variety and creativity, it also involves actively looking for new clients to represent, and persuading the media to "buy into" clients' images, goods and services.

This left one job: the magazine editor. While the skills and experiences on my CV would make me a strong candidate for any of the three jobs, the personality assessment effectively ruled me out of two of them. By completing the questionnaire we discovered that the columnist job would be too rigid for me, with not enough variety. The PR job would not be right for me either, as I have an aversion to selling and persuading people. However, I do have the right mixture of characteristics for the magazine editor role: I am disciplined to meet deadlines, but creative and innovative to generate new and interesting feature ideas, I enjoy organising projects, but am adaptable enough to work around problems and write on a variety of subjects. Overall, I felt this psychometric test was a scarily accurate assessment of me!

Source: Executive Magazine (May 2005)