Personality tests for job applicants
What personality tests do you use for job applicants? There is a way to narrow the field before this stage and it makes use of public domain information that is extremely revealing.
Brent Marriner has a vibrant Twitter account with over 13,000 Followers and almost 10,000 Likes. Brent also has Down’s Syndrome. It’s an innocent account designed simply to share his experience of how he lives with his condition and to demonstrate how able he is. It’s not designed to be inspirational and it is certainly not political.
However, the story (you can read it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-45901125) of how people interact with his posting highlights a worrying and increasingly growing trend in social media, in some quarters at least, for people to hijack 3rd party accounts to share their own, often highly polarised, opinions.
What started out as lifestyle commentary now has to be constantly monitored to remove the dogmatic agenda of others.
It’s indicative of a characteristic that we often come across in our personality profiling of users of social media, in that their activity is based on reactive commentary of others’ posts while, often, offering very little constructive content themselves. Moreover, this activity is normally seeking advocacy from the primary subject to provide validation to their own agenda.
So why are we telling you this?
It’s another example of how so many people reveal their true selves through these digital platforms – personality traits as well as beliefs that wouldn’t be apparent in a job interview, for example. Scientific analysis of an individual’s digital footprint can provide valuable insight into their personality and, therefore, suitability for various tasks and job roles. By profiling applicants for vacant positions in your organisation, you are perfectly placed to assess whether they will be a good fit with your company’s culture as well as technically qualified for the role. Further, as we have also found, it can be a genuine eye-opener for the individual in demonstrating to them how often, and unwittingly, this behaviour can occur and prompting them towards a more positive and productive approach to their posting and commentary.
