In the recruitment process, it is very common that you are asked to explain yourself, your motivations and even taking personality tests. In this post, I want to share four fun personality tests that I have stumbled upon.

1. Learnability Quotient

Manpower Group is doing a yearly survey where they ask employers about how they recruited staff over the past year. This last survey, they found that 40 % of the employers have looked for some candidate they have not found due to the Talent Shortage. When Manpower asks, what did you do when you didn’t find someone, 53 % said they were doing additional training and development for their existing staff. This is up from around 1in five the year before. It seems safe to assume that the ability to learn is getting increasingly important.

This is understandable. Think about how the business landscape have changed over the past decade or two. In some areas, like programming, the new tools come so quickly that things used for 10 or 20 years ago might not even exist or be used today.

Yesterday, I read an article about a company that has started to buy robots that will flip hamburgers. Imagine if they would put these at McDonald’s. Where would the people working in the kitchen do? They would have to learn a new skill or find an employer that still flips the burgers manually.

Also, they could use the skills they have developed. Like being able to work under pressure, work in a team and communicating fast and efficiently with their colleagues. They can take these skills and apply them in a different setting. But, that would most likely need the person to do some learning. The learnability quotient “reflects your desire and ability to grow and adapt to new circumstances and challenges throughout your work life” and you can find an assessment here.

2. Hogan X

This is a fun and pretty fast personality test. It is the same company that has constructed this test and the one above. This test goes over the following things:

• Your values – this is great because you can find organizations that have those same values.
• Your bright side – how you work and behave when you are at your very best.
• Your dark side – how you work and behave when you are at your worst

These things can be used in interviews for the classic – tell me three strongest and weakest points about yourself. You can tell the recruiter that you have been taking these tests and what you think about the results.

You can find the tests here.

3. 16personalities

This is based on 16 personality types based on the classic Myers-Briggs. These are good to understand yourself and others. The idea is that every person has a combination of the following opposing characteristics:

• Introversion (I) or Extraversion (E)
• Intuition (N) or Sensing (S)
• Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

You can find an test here. Personally, I found this very spot on.

4. Good.co

This one is super fun. It has personality test and also suggests suitable employers. You can also share your results with a friend. A lot of fun to play around with and this has similar types of assessments as the 16 personalities one in the sense that it has some of the same characteristics such as introversion/extraversion.

I really like that this is connected to actual employers. When I did the test, I definitely found some companies I wouldn’t have imagined working for. Try it out here.

Can We Measure This?

One thing that we can talk about Is whether it is possible to do these kinds of tests reliably. If you read about the Myers-Briggs personality tests, you can see that they definitely have their fair share of criticism.

For instance, one good point that Paul R Matthews point out with the science behind the 16 personalities site is that the test makes it look like people are more different than they are. A person that is just a tiny bit extraverted is a different personality type than a person that is a tiny bit extroverted. Even though these people, in reality, would be very similar to each other in terms of extroversion/introversion. There are also some critics that argue the measurements are not opposing parts of the spectrum. In other words, a person could be both thinking and feeling for instance.

What I think though is that these tools are a great way to reflect on ourselves. These tools will perhaps not give you the fact about you, but it will give you an answer and you can look at that answer and reflect if you think this is something you agree with or not. For extraversion and introversion as an example, I sometimes have days when I am feeling extraverted and others when I feel introverted. I also think it has a lot to do with the context. If I have things to say about a topic, I would talk more than if I don’t have something to say.

Return to “8 Rules to Win The Job”