Who Should I Be When Taking a Recruitment Personality Assessment?

I’ve taken many personality assessments while looking for a job recently, mostly in two formats. One gives me three statements and asks which describes me most and which describes me least. The other gives me a statement and asks me to choose how well it fits on a four- or five-point scale. I can understand the questions, but I don’t really understand what they measure, or how those choices turn into conclusions.

Then there is a more practical question: should I try faking it a little? Or perhaps invent a supposedly “perfect-scoring personality,” and answer as that person? When the results go to a recruiter, it is hard to put what they want entirely out of mind. This post is a short look at that question, and an attempt to put my current understanding into words.

All three sound good. How do I choose?

Let’s make up a quick example:

A. I enjoy persuading others to accept my views.

B. I tend to plan what I need to do in advance.

C. I usually stay calm when something unexpected happens.

Choose the statement that describes you most and the one that describes you least.

All three sound pretty good. If I could rate them separately, I might feel that each describes me to some extent. But now I have to put them in order. Choosing B as most like me might be easy enough, but does choosing A as least like me tell the company that I am bad at communicating? Choosing C seems to suggest I struggle under pressure. A simple question starts getting a little too much thought.

This format is called forced choice. Designers can group statements that measure different tendencies but sound similarly desirable, asking people to compare which fits them better. In more academic terms, the options are matched in social desirability. Combined with the requirement to rank them, that makes it impossible to endorse every nice description at once. Still, “least like me” is a relative position within that group. It does not automatically mean I have none of that characteristic.

The other format is more familiar. Take “I like to plan my work in advance,” with five options ranging from “very unlike me” to “very like me.” This is a Likert-type response format. It lets me rate each statement independently; a four-point version typically leaves out the middle option.

The distinction is roughly this: one asks how well something describes me; the other asks which of several things describes me better. The uncomfortable part of the second format is also the information it is trying to collect.

After I answer, what does it see?

Basic scoring for rating items is fairly easy to understand. IPIP’s public scoring instructions give one approach: score positively keyed items from one to five, reverse that order for negatively keyed items, then add the scores within each scale. A reverse-keyed item can be understood as describing the tendency from the opposite direction. Suppose a scale includes “I keep things organized” and “I often leave things in a mess.” Stronger agreement with the second statement might mean a lower score on orderliness. A real questionnaire may cover more dimensions, with corresponding rules for grouping and scoring its items.

Forced choice accumulates comparisons. Choosing B as most like me and A as least like me in the example gives the order B, C, A. As a simplified scoring example, we could give planning two points and calmness one, then add up the results across a few dozen questions. But that is only an illustration to help explain the idea. Real systems are often more complicated.

Traditional forced-choice scoring can produce “ipsative” scores: these are better suited to describing relative tendencies within one person, and comparing two people directly becomes problematic. Brown and Maydeu-Olivares’s paper discusses how Thurstonian IRT can address this. Roughly speaking, it uses calibrated items and the full set of choices to estimate which trait levels best explain the responses. This kind of modeling can estimate scores across personality dimensions from the complete set of answers. The scores can be high or low, but that does not rank people as better or worse overall.

Scores may then be compared with norms, placing the results in the context of a reference group. For example, one public SHL sample report presents standardized scores from one to ten across several dimensions of work behavior and identifies comparison groups.

So a company might see a set of tendencies, higher and lower scores across dimensions, and interpretations based on them. Exactly how each employer evaluates job fit or compares candidates is harder to know. An assessment can inform screening and judgments about job fit, but a low score on a personality dimension does not make a candidate unqualified. Inconsistent responses do not automatically mean someone was answering carelessly either.

Should I play the ideal employee?

With that in mind, the question of faking it starts looking less straightforward.

With a knowledge test, I can prepare toward a correct answer if I know what it is. Personality tendencies do not come with a universal perfect answer sheet. Being meticulous is useful, but a task might also call for getting a rough version out first and improving it later. Independent judgment matters, and working with others also means sometimes accepting their views. It is hard to guess exactly what a particular job needs just by reading the options. Besides, a high score on a trait does not directly establish strong job skills.

I understand why someone might want to put on a performance. Recruitment involves selection; we cannot expect people to forget that while answering. Learning the format and understanding what “least like me” means seem like reasonable preparation. But if I first have to imagine an employee who is outgoing, meticulous, willing to take risks, and never makes mistakes, then answer the entire questionnaire for them, I would question whether such a person even exists.

Can the system tell? The SHL sample report linked above does include a consistency indicator, but consistency is not the same as honesty. Someone can consistently make themselves look better, while another person might respond inconsistently because they interpret questions differently. That indicator alone cannot establish who is lying. Reverse scoring itself is not a consistency check, let alone a lie detector. These designs can offer clues for checking responses, but they do not give a questionnaire the ability to read minds.

For now, I am not particularly keen to spend my energy inventing a persona. Understanding the rules can prevent some misunderstandings. Trying to guess a scoring system when I know neither its weights nor its target seems like making things rather hard for myself. Besides, different jobs call for different ways of working and different abilities. Outgoing or reserved? Independent or collaborative? Many of these judgments are hard to make from a questionnaire alone; we also need to see someone at work. Deciding whether a person suits a job from a few questionnaires and psychological measures still seems like a lot to ask.

The person it thinks I am

“Answer honestly” still leaves a question: me in which setting? Someone might avoid organizing activities with friends but willingly take the lead on a project. They might be casual in everyday life and plan carefully when they care about the work. These are easy situations to imagine. Any one of those fragments seems insufficient to stand in for the whole person.

The approach I tentatively agree with is to first think through how I usually act when working and learning, giving myself a stable point of reference for my answers. I would try to recall my typical behavior in study tasks, internships, and projects. I would try not to answer one question as my everyday self, the next as my ideal self, and the one after that with whatever the company wants in mind. At least that lets me know whom I am describing, and makes it easier to stay consistent. Of course, if the questionnaire specifies a setting, its instructions come first.

If you don’t mind giving it a little more thought, imagine yourself in that role. Faced with this kind of problem in this setting, what decision would you make? And what decision do you think you should make? Those two answers might be the same. They might not.

This is no Silver Bullet. Don’t expect a small approach like this to make every personality assessment go your way. Employers use assessments to understand your working tendencies and help judge fit; they cannot turn you into someone suited to every job. Looking for a job is a choice on both sides. There is no need to turn yourself into an offer-collecting machine either.

There is one more thing that would bother me a little. Candidates answer all these questions about themselves, yet may never see the final report. Without that feedback, we do not know how the system interprets our answers, or get a chance to say, “The person in that sentence doesn’t quite match what I meant.”

What does it think I am like?

I would quite like to see that report. To see the person it thinks I am, and, if something feels wrong, consider whether it misunderstood me or I hadn’t quite thought things through when I answered.