Personality test are widely used in the world for some time. The goal most of the time has always been one of development and self-knowledge. There is a huge variety of personality tests, but in general the best known are DISC, MBTI, PI, among others. Mindsight's profile test is similar to these tests, with the difference that it is designed with a focus on people selection.
In selecting people personality tests, we understand that they are a solid basis for predicting business performance as well. However, there are some conceptual problems regardless of the methodology, when applied in scale to the general public. They Are:
I. Self-knowledge: as it’s a self-assessment, that is, the person speaks about himself, if the person does not know himself well, it may be that the answers do not reflect reality;
II. Projection: Occurs quite a bit in general recruitment. People tend to mark alternatives that they like or that they believe the company will like, also not representing exactly their personality.
III. Context: the person may even be sincere and have good self-knowledge, but the context can interfere a lot. For example, the person believes that they are a very analytical person, but they are in an environment where people are not very analytical. If that person was in an environment where people are really analytic, maybe they
wouldn't feel that analytic at all.
Given these issues, the pure personality test for scaled people selection may not work as well. The ideal format is always to correlate it with at least one skill test to complement the collected information.
Regardless of the problems, overall, the personality tests are a good way to understand behavioral trends and is a rich information method for any process of selecting or developing people.
The methodology we selected to use for our personality tests is the BIG 5 testing methodology. It's a more recent theory and was developed with the purpose of being less classificatory and seeking to cover all facets of human behavior. In developing the BIG 5 framework, the responsible scientists classified words within the dictionary to
relate towards a certain behavior. They classified over 15.000 words. After that, the words were grouped until they reached the five main characteristic fronts.
To match positions, Mindsight used a 16-character break. Giving freedom to adapt to more positions and fit into a slightly more sophisticated format.