Introspection is the Reason Why Most People Take Employment Personality Assessments
Why Recent Graduates, Employees, and Executives Are Willing to Train to Take Employment Personality
Assessments
The idea that a corporation has a character just as a person has a personality, appeared in the book titled, The Character of a Corporation: How Your Company's Culture Can Make or Break Your Business
by Rob Goffee and Gareth
Jones, Collins, 1998. When you dig deeper, you find that corporations actually have complex characters with many facets, like a
diamond.
People are that way too, especially new college graduates trying to know more about themselves and seeking validated tools.
Employers have the need to guard their company’s image. Every company also has a culture of its own as well.
People, corporations, and personality assessment publishers also are complex and multi-faceted. Tests are fluid and ever-changing.
So are corporations and their CEOs. The question is, do employees have a fluid personality? Or is it more like knowing oneself
more is a tool to request flexibility and fluidity in the job task itself?
College career counselors usually contact
various personality assessment publishing companies that are willing to offer training workshops which guide students and
recent graduates seeking introspection. Employers and students require a tangible tool to know more about themselves. That
tool is the employment personality assessment.
The assessments are tools for matching personality traits
to job descriptions that are the best-fit tasks. Most tests use word pairs showing opposite personality preferences, traits,
or styles. For example, you either are outgoing… or the opposite. You absorb information and make decisions based on
hunches… or its opposite, by using your five senses. You either make choices based on your personal likes or by rational,
logical lists of pros and cons. You weigh the pros against the cons and go with what is greater.
Employers are seeking information. Prospective employees
are seeking direction. Graduating students are taking workshops with life and career coaches that charge a fee to administer
a battery of personality preference questionnaires, classifiers, indicators, career inventories, and other types of assessments
in order to give students direction before they apply for jobs with employers that may give them similar batteries of personality
assessments tests.
The practice tests given in the workshops are looked at as
training. After all, students are familiar with taking coaching workshops and tutoring to pass SAT, LCAT, MCAT, and other
entrance exams. Why not entrance ‘exam’s before you start your first job? Only the personality assessments have
no right or wrong answers. It’s all about choices. You have to choose one attitude or the opposite. It’s a black
and white decision….No gray areas. Either the ‘real’ you is one way or the opposite.
The hard part is to find a corporation to work for whose
CEO is not your opposite in values, personality preferences, or goals. Your personality traits need to match the character,
values, and goals of the company. Humans have personalities. Corporations have characters. They have characters because they
are run by humans that either match in personality with you or are your opposite in goals, objectives, and missions.
You either are able to perform with explorative, probing
versatility and spontaneity, and fly by the seat of your pants. Or you do the opposite—draw up a plan, organize it,
make quick decisions, and follow the rules. You either like to follow traditional, grounded, historical, poll-taking, benchmarking
successful but tight ship company attitudes and policies, or you do its opposite, follow visionary, change-oriented, futuristic
ideas and theories with your head floating in the sky.
Regardless of what company’s employment personality
assessment you take, you are going to be one type of person or the opposite. The goal of any of these various employment personality
tests is to give you clues that will let you know more about yourself. You are taking an assessment to find out what you want
to be when you grow up that you really will enjoy. The tests are meant as guides and tools.
New college graduates want to know more about themselves.
The idea that people only want to work for a paycheck is true for those who say they don’t know what they want to be
when they grow up because they haven’t taken enough assessments to learn about themselves and don’t have time
to develop those gut feelings or inner hunches that tell them what they don’t want to do until they’ve tried interning
at a job.
Each year, thousands of students take personality assessments
in college before they begin to apply to various corporations. Workshop attendance at various companies that prepare people
for taking employment personality assessments run in the thousands. Attendance at these types of workshops is increasing.
Currently, it’s not enough to walk into a job interview and take a battery of employment-related assessments. The enthusiasm
and charisma attached to knowing yourself drives thousands each year to take training workshops in “knowing yourself”
by taking similar assessments before you even walk into a job interview.
If you have taken training workshops in how to use personality
assessments to know yourself better, then you are prepared to walk into a job interview or move onto a training team of executives
studying how to make better decisions and already are familiar with taking these various types of employment personality assessments
published by a variety of test publishing companies catering to organizational and industrial psychologists, counselors, human
resources departments, educational technologists, and executives who use these tests in team work.
Most college students don’t spend long enough months
pondering what they want out of a particular career or job description. The personality assessments give them the tools to
begin a long search on knowing more about their personality preferences.
The success of these tests is supported by uncertainty of
jobs. For example, fifty years ago, who would have thought of training to become a Web designer, Internet support technician,
or video podcaster? No one knows how long his or her job will last before it is outsourced or where the long-lasting jobs
will be. For example, in 2007, high-school graduates are in demand as entry-level railroad industry trainees. And experienced
railroad help with community college and four-year-college technical, marketing, engineering, or accounting degrees are in-demand
at starting salaries around $67,000 annually.
Employment personality assessments are taken because people
that are interested in doing their best and reaching their maximum potential want to understand themselves. Failure is seen
as being a round peg in a square hole—a person suited for one type of job trapped in another type of job because of
fear of losing financial security.
The various test publishers allow employers to use tools
to help people find out what they want out of a job or lifestyle. Since the 1960s, students have been seeking jobs where they
can express themselves, develop their creativity or ingenuity, and reach their full potential in whatever they can do best.
It’s not about doing a job because you have a certain intelligence or emotional quotient. It’s more about doing
a job because you are enthusiastic about the tasks involved in the job. The tasks make you feel energized and filled with
joy.
What the employers get out of buying the tests from the test
publishers or from outsourced coaches, or on-staff human resources personnel and organizational psychologists are tools to
find out whether their executives or potential employees at any level of management or labor are matched so that they present
the least financial risk to the corporation, government, or institution.
The employee takes the assessment for deeper self knowledge.
The employer offers the assessment as a tool for achieving cost-effectiveness, lessening risk, and improving connections between
labor and management. The philosophy is that you can’t know too much about yourself, and your boss needs to know more
about you to improve and stabilize corporate connections.
