Six things to watch out for when choosing personality asssessment tools

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Personality assessment tools have been used in recruitment and employee development for decades. Using these tools, employers try to select, hire and educate the right employees. There are many different psycho-diagnostic approaches and tests people take with different feelings and results. The tests often have only a very limited success rate in evaluating people's real assumptions about jobs and positions.

You may have experienced it yourself. The results of a personality test excluded you from the selection process for a job or were the reason you were not offered an opportunity to be promoted. The results might be legitimate, but also might not. You had no other choice but to accept it or possibly find another employer.

Profession-oriented diagnostic tools should help companies, but often harms them. How can you prevent these possibly harmful consequences, or at least minimize the risk? Tlnt.com pointed out serious warning signs that should not be overlooked when choosing personality assessment tools.

1. Obsolete methods

The fact that a tool has been used for the past 50 years does not necessarily mean that it is still valid.

2. Evaluation using adjectives

The tests which allow respondents to evaluate themselves using adjectives often achieve distorted results. If you were applying for a sales job, and the question was whether you are "friendly" or "shy", how would you respond?

3. Different meaning of responses

Assessment tools often give candidates three or four possible answers to a question and force them to choose the one that characterizes them the most and the least. The problem is that the actual difference between the two choices may be different for different people.

4. True or False

Even in this case it is often impossible to understand the answers clearly. For example, the respondents can be asked whether they like talking to people. If they answer yes, does that mean they like to talk to everybody? If the answer is no, do they hate talking to everybody? What if they like to talk only with people they already know or those who approach them first?

5. The categories are too general

People are so different that it is difficult to classify them into categories. Assessment tools should involve as many specific categories as possible.

6. A description of thinking is missing

Some tools only assess personality traits and do not reflect the ways people think. How a person behaves can be quite different. However, if you do not know how he or she thinks, you can hardly understand their behavior.

What kinds of personality tests do you have experience with? What tools work and which don't?

-kk-