How are personality tests made?
Hogan Assessments spend a great deal of time thinking about the difference between identity and reputation when they build their personality assessments.
Identity, or how we think about ourselves, is frequently changing and often self-serving, and that makes it a poor basis for building personality assessments.
Reputation, or how others think about us, is often more stable and a more useful way to build personality assessments that predict job performance. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Because reputation reflects past behavior, reputation is the best predictor of future behavior.
Hogan validate their assessments by having people take those assessments. Then ask other people who know them, such as peers, direct reports, and managers, to describe what they’re like. The assessment data and observer ratings—along with job performance review data, objective performance data, and 360-degree data—are stored in a database with personality data from several million people. Once someone has taken Hogan Assessments, Hogan can use the information from their database to predict whether the person will be able to do a job, how they will behave on the job, and even whether they will like the job.
How do personality tests predict job performance?
Personality assessments should measure personality from the perspective of reputation, which is how others are likely to describe or experience us. Reputation is a collection of past and present behaviors described by others, and we know it to be the best predictor of future job performance. We have found that personality helps us to describe the characteristics and behaviors that are required for or important to job performance—things like resiliency and strategic self-awareness and collaboration.
Hogan’s personality tests are based on decades of research on personality psychology and measurement, and they have been validated against external criteria, including job performance and peer ratings. This allows us to describe the reputation that a job candidate likely has in the workplace.
Hogan also compare the way a job candidate scores to thousands of other people to determine how that person will likely behave at work. Using custom research involving job analysis, Hogan can also create personality profiles to determine how well candidates will fit into a particular job role or organisational culture.