PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT AND TESTING

It is a process of personality measurement where a specialist uses personality assessment tools to determine different theories of personality using different types of personality assessment techniques. The type of tool/test/assessment technique used depends on our objective and the number of persons assessed. There are different methods generally used for different purposes like job, service, etc. So let us discuss all of them one by one.

METHODS OF PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT

• OBSERVATION: It involves observing the candidate like it is generally used by mental hospitals. Here we place a candidate in a room where all things are staged like a pre-defined set of objects. We will notify the candidate’s behavior over time that how their mood gets changes, how they control them selfs, till what time they are pleasant and kind to others. It generally also involves a one-way mirror or hidden and a control room where we can change the room set up or monitor the candidate’s behavior without getting noticed. This technique is also used by television series like big brother and the Trueman show.
• SITUATIONAL TEST: This test consists of making a special kind of situation around a person which will prove whether that person can work in such situations or not. For example, generally, pilots and astronauts go through a test that is Pilot Aptitude Battery Test (PABT) which tells us more about whether this trainee can work in an environment where a pilot generally has to or not.
• QUESTIONNAIRE: It is more like a normal class test, objective test, or descriptive test where a set of questions are asked to a person or group to get to know their response and send them for further analysis. Generally, advertising, data collection, and feedback processing companies use them to understand their audience and make their services more reliable for present customers while attracting new customers.
• INTERVIEW: Here personal views of a person are understood by a single or group of panel members. The person who is giving the interview is known as the interviewee and the person who ask questions while taking the interview of the interviewee is known as the interviewer. Generally, interviews are taken in jobs, colleges, and many competitions to reduce the number of candidates and to get to know more about the candidates through processing. It is not possible to interview every candidate so that’s why interviews are taken at later stages in any selection process. The main aim of the interview is to know that if we hire, select, or commissioned a person for a specific role whether that person can work efficiently or not due to their social skills.
• RATING SCALE: Here we rate a person’s ability for some specific work. Generally, we scale a person’s ability on a five-point scale, where every point means something like 1=very bad, 2=bad, 3=normal, 4=good, and 5=very good. Many times rating scales are used as an addition to interviews for listing the order of candidates who will go for an interview or we can eliminate the candidates who score comparatively less. The rating scale only measures the ability of a person in a specific task so that’s why we can’t solely depend on it for a selection process or a person’s ranking because for many selection processes the candidate has to be excellent in many different things.
• PERSONALITY INVENTORY: Here we consider a person with the personality which best suits him from our personality inventory or we can say a set of personalities that we already have. For example, we have discussed the “OCEAN” technique where we assign a person with a personality out of five predefined personalities and these are Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Generally, this technique is used when we need to sort people for different roles in a job, team, or activity.
• PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES: It comprises projecting a person in a role before giving him/her that role. It is like a test drive where we first test how that person performs in a role before we consider him for that role. For example to get a driver’s license we also have to give this test before giving us a license to drive they test as in the role of a driver that as a driver what we will do. Generally, this test is taken for selection processes of roles that are sensitive and high risk. Also, it might cost very much to project a person for a sensitive role so that’s why it is taken at very later stages in the selection process I think it is the best technique to test a person for a role if the cost of projection is not a problem.