Ever wonder how your personality affects your career choices and your successes and failures in life?

Want to learn a bit more about yourself and how it can affect your career choices and career successes?

One of the ways that people can learn more about themselves, their likes/dislikes, their personality and how it relates to their career is through the use of a personality test. There are certainly plenty of them available and some employers will use them before hiring a person especially if the employer wants to hire a specific kind of person or wants to confirm certain things that they believe about the candidate.

I took my first personality test when I was in business school in my fourth year of university. We did the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which is an extensive test that asks you to answer questions to help determine your personality and is based on Carl Jung’s psychological type theory. Jung believed that the way people prefer to think and act was something that is either innate or learned. In other words the way we act is either something that we were born with or that we learned over time.

From the Wikipedia page on the subject:

Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:

The “rational” (judging) functions: thinking and feeling
The “irrational” (perceiving) functions: sensing and intuition

Jung went on to suggest that these functions are expressed in either an introverted or extraverted form.

You are asked a series of Yes/No questions and are asked to choose between two different positions to determine your personality type. Some examples of questions that might be found on the Myers-Briggs test include:

1. You are almost never late for your appointments
2. It’s difficult to get you excited
3. You trust reason rather than feelings
4. You tend to sympathize with other people
5. When solving a problem you would rather follow
a familiar approach than seek a new one

So when I first did the test, my results came back as Introversion (I), Sensing (S), Thinking (T), Judgement (J) which results in an abbreviated 4 letter term, in my case ISTJ.

I later did the test again a few years later after I began working and had similar results.

What I remember about the test is that it asks questions and gets you to pick the answer that best describes you. Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out which response best suits you while other times the decision is more straight forward.

I like these sorts of test and don’t mind doing them. I take results with a grain of salt but I also think I’m a pretty good judge of character including my own and can look at myself with an open mind.

Why Your Personality Matters

OK, so the title of this post was Why Your Personality Matters but up until now I’ve only discussed aspects of personality tests and why they can be an interesting way to learn more about yourself.

What is it about your personality and the way you think that is so important?

If you look at the examples of questions found on the Myers-Briggs test mentioned above, even that short list probably conjures up examples of situations you’ve experienced, companies you’ve worked for and problems you’ve had to solve where you had to make one decision or another and typically your personality – along with other specifics of course – will at least help to determine which route you choose.

Certainly, the personalities of the people you’re dealing with will certainly come into play too. So even while you’re learning about yourself by doing a personality test, it also reminds that you that other people have their own personality too and understanding the various types that exist can only help.

The same goes for many other aspects of life. Take buying something for example. How could you categorize people’s buying habits? One way would be to segment people as follows:

Impulse buyers
Bargain hunters
Comparison shoppers
Needs-based shoppers
Loyal customers

If you were a sales person, imagine how valuable it would be to know the shopping personality type of every customer you dealt with to know the process they used to purchase something? Short of that, knowing what cues to look for that would help you determine their shopping personality type would be a bonus.

If you were dealing with a bargain hunter, you’d know that they aren’t necessarily loyal to any brand/company and are probably going to make their buying decision largely based on price.

Similarly, in a career setting it helps to know not only about the personality of people you work with but also people that you’ll come into contact with during a job interview.

Understanding your work colleagues’ personality can help you get things done quicker and more successfully. If you know that the colleague you’re working with is the type of person who tends to procrastinate and not make decisions as quickly as you’d like, you’ll know that you might need to push them along and not get frustrated when they delay things.

Understanding a hiring manager’s personality who is interviewing you for a job helps you make a better connection and if necessary cut to the chase if you happen to be interviewing with a type A personality who just wants to know the facts and get short, concise answers from you without long, flowing responses.

Further, if you happen to find yourself in a career rut, aren’t really sure where to go next in your career or wonder if you’re even in the right job, taking a personality test can be the first thing you do to take a step back and actually learn something about yourself rather than just diving into another job search and applying for jobs that might not be any better than the one you have now.

Plus it can be a great way to confirm what you already know about yourself while also becoming more aware of why you make the decisions you do which can help you in both your personal and work life moving forward.

What’s the next step?

You can do a Google search for “Myers-Briggs test” or “personality test” and probably find a few websites that will let you do a free test online to get you started.

If you want something quick that you can do right now, I’d suggest taking a free 5 minute online test that I found online from a company called iPersonic. It might be the first step to help you make some positive changes in your work life and at a minimum might help you learn a bit more about yourself.

You can see my results in the graphic at the top of this blog posting on the left hand side graphic and then take the free personality test just like I did!

From the result above, you’ll see that I’m an Independent Thinker which I’m ok with.

To do your free personality test: click here.

Which one would you hire?

Going back 11 months, I’d written a post on the purpose of the HR interview and in his comment, Rob took me to task for not properly answering the question of why the HR interview exists in the first place.

I had a look at the post in question and then responded so you can see both his comment and my retort in the above-mentioned link but it did get me to thinking that perhaps I could readdress the issue of the HR interview because clearly Rob wasn’t sold on my approach to the question of why the interview exists although from his comments he seemed to have a poor view of the HR interview to start with. Maybe he had a bad experience in the past or perhaps like many people he just doesn’t take HR interviews seriously.

Either way, his point is a fair one but when you ask the question of why the HR interview exists, I don’t really know to give a response that will cover all the possibilities. In my experience, companies decide to have an HR component to the hiring process for many reasons.

Typically you’ll probably that many larger companies have an HR department and always include them in the hiring process which seems to irritate people like Rob who don’t feel they serve any real purpose. I’m sure many of you have been to interviews where you get asked fluffy HR-type questions that you feel are a waste of time but you know it’s part of the process and you just accept it and do your best. I wasn’t necessarily referring to these examples of HR interviews when I responded to Rob.

Instead I was thinking of cases I experienced as a recruiter where we worked with HR managers or staff who were hard asses and who in some cases wielded a fair bit of power in the hiring process. I can think of cases where the HR staffer used to hold the job they were interviewing which ruled out the excuses people often give when they don’t want to attend an HR interview i.e. HR staff aren’t technical, they don’t know my job, my answers will go over their head, etc. I’ve had some job searchers surprised when they attend an interview with these sorts of HR staff and find that they can’t pull the wool over their eyes because the HR staff actually knew their stuff.

I can also think of HR staff I’ve worked with who were simply very good interviewers and were good at weeding people out and who had a good track record when it came to hiring the right person. Often these HR staff members were quite well liked by hiring managers and were seen as being a valuable part of the hiring process.

That’s who I was thinking of when I posted back in February 2010. I realize in hindsight though that most HR interviews don’t work that way and that many people do have a poor opinion of HR interviewers even before they’ve attended the interview.

Companies utilize HR interviews for different reasons and not all HR interviews are a waste of time or a cakewalk in my experience. That was the point I was trying to make. Good HR staff can help to determine which staff will fit in the company, which ones are most likely to stay long term and can help to act as a second opinion for a hiring manager who might favor one candidate without considering both the person’s pros and cons. Hiring just one person can cost tens of thousands of dollars when you consider the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, paying, firing (and then replacing) a staff member who doesn’t work out for whatever reason. A smart company wants to ensure they do this process right and limit the number of times they have to replace someone who wasn’t a good hire.

And as I mentioned to Rob in my response to him, whenever I had a job candidate lamenting the fact that they had to attend an interview with an HR staffer, I used to remind them they certainly weren’t forced to attend and if they wanted they could cancel the interview and let someone else get the job. We generally don’t decide who interviews us but you certainly aren’t forced to take the interview if speaking with an HR person is going to be such a problem for you.

People often like to marginalize the HR (human resources) interview and treat it as being unimportant and a cakewalk. In my experience, treating the HR interview like this almost guarantees you’ll fail in the interview.

In my experience, it’s technical people who tend to treat HR interviews with disdain and go into the interview with the attitude that “the HR person interviewing me won’t know what I’m talking about and everything I tell them technically will be over their head.”

In general terms companies usually schedule HR interviews to get a soft-skills evaluation of potential employees and to ensure they are not only getting a person who knows the job and fulfills the specific requirements but is also someone who “fits” the company and its culture.

Plus it’s another way of comparing candidates against each other if they get down to two or more candidates and can’t figure out which one to hire.

HR interviews are often maligned for being ones that ask simple questions (although some HR interviews can go this way if the person conducting the interview isn’t particularly good at it) but I can also think of human resources staff who literally had the ability to prevent someone from being hired even if the hiring manager wanted that person.

In some cases, I’ve seen HR staff whose interviews are actually the most difficult part of the interview process. In these cases, the person being interviewed has no trouble with the hiring manager but falls down when they’re put in a different position and are forced to rely on their soft skills when interviewing with a human resources rep.

Bottom line: if the company includes the HR interview in the interview process, I’d treat it seriously and assume that the company does, too.

For more information on HR interviews that I previously wrote, check out my November 1 post on HR interviews.

The rule of the day relates to HR interviews and HR staff in general.

Take a look at the swan towels above. They look harmless but as the caption proves, they are trained in MMA and anyone who has ever watched mixed martial arts knows what a tough sport it is.

Just like the hare underestimated the tortoise in the children’s story, people often make the mistake of underestimating the importance of HR interviews and HR staff.

HR interviews and HR staff are somewhat like these swan towels. People ignore them at their peril.

OK, the swans being trained in MMA is tongue-in-cheek but the sentiment about HR interviews isn’t.

I recall one company I worked with where the HR manager had so much clout that if she didn’t like you, you weren’t getting a job with that company regardless of what the hiring manager said.

Was that too much power to give to an HR manager?

Perhaps, but that was the reality. They had a reputation of being a tough company to interview with too. I recall that they tended not to make too many hiring mistakes so perhaps their system worked just fine.

I’ve forgotten the number of times that I’ve heard someone brush off an HR interview as being a fluff interview or try to avoid having to meet with HR because they think it will be a waste of their time.

Typically, it’s technical people that do this in my experience. They seem to think that everything they know will be over the head of the mere mortal HR staffer and that they can b.s. their way through the interview.

The funny part is when the person doesn’t realize that the HR staffer used to do their job and is a techie just like them. I’ve seen that happen and it’s pretty funny to hear the HR staffer tell me post interview that the person they interviewed is a b.s. artist and tried to snow them until they found out that the HR staffer knows exactly what they were talking about.

It wasn’t funny to know that I just lost out on an opportunity to help someone get a job but it is funny to see a smart ass put in their place.

Don’t assume that the person interviewing you knows less than you do. The opposite might be true.