Good Advice is Hard to Find

It is interesting to see how little real advice there is, either in books or on the web, about how to approach the personality questionnaires used in selection. For example, most of the job sites on the internet have several pages of advice for job-seekers on how to prepare their resume or how to answer ‘tough’ interview questions.

However, when it comes to preparing yourself for a personality test, the advice is usually limited to ‘just be yourself’. This is very inconsistent. After all, if you’re going to spend considerable time and effort preparing your resume and preparing for the interview, then why not prepare yourself for the personality questionnaire?

To understand where this ‘just be yourself’ advice comes from you need to look at where these job sites get their content from. The advice that these sites do give is often little more than a reworking of material that can be found on their competitor’s web sites or in any one of dozens of books on these topics. Much of it is written by professional copywriters who may not have much interest in the recruitment and selection industry. This should not be surprising; job sites make their money by putting numbers of candidates forward, not by successfully getting individual candidates jobs.

They are not experts in the workings of the selection process, but they do feel as though they should have some advice on their web sites to bring in traffic and to add some credibility. Another reason for the ‘just be yourself’ advice is because the test suppliers have been very successful in getting across the message that these tests are so sophisticated that you cannot influence your result without being ‘caught’.

This is a case of ‘sales talk’ becoming accepted wisdom because it is being repeated again and again by every company that produces tests. This is after all a very competitive industry and every company selling these tests must push the message that their test is 100% reliable if they are going to stay in business.