Personality Testing

Curiosity, innovation, and improvement.

Personality tests are… missing something.

 

Present personality tests tend to fall short for individuals, but especially organizations. Without clarity around implementation, meaning, and value, they are infrequently leveraged, and rarely done well. This is primarily because most people have difficulty identifying with traditional personality tests.

If you’re looking for my thoughts on personality testing in the workplace, check out this paper!

 

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Most people’s first experience with personality tests, this test forces you to choose between 4 sets of traits:

  • Introversion vs. Extraversion

  • Intuitive vs. Sensory

  • Feeling vs. Thinking

  • Judging vs. Perceiving

Ultimately, it presents a “person type” in a 4 letter code to identify with. However, if you don’t identify strongly with a set of traits, you are out of luck.

Big Five (FFM) Personality Traits

This test measures each OCEAN trait on a 0-100% scale:

  • Openness

  • Conscientiousness

  • Extraversion

  • Agreeableness

  • Neuroticism

The results of this are 5 percentages, which might indicate where you lie, but provide little to identify with.

 

So what’s the solution here?

Personality testing needs to find a way to accommodate all levels of personality, not only the trait level. Our values, passions and experiences play into who we are, and there is significant context missing. In addition, there needs to be an element of selection of traits—not every person identifies with all of them.

Since 2018, I have been working on a personality test that addresses these issues. It measures individuals across a wide variety of dynamics, and then allows them to sort through which ones are important to them and identify the relationship between traits. This sorting activity reveals their self-schema — a cognitive fingerprint unique to each person and impossible to communicate.

Engaging with and discussing someone’s self-schema unlocks a deeper level of personality — their personal narrative, the story they are living out. This allows for a comprehensive, quantitative and qualitative capture of personality.

If you are interested in learning more or taking my test, feel free to reach out!

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