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If you are not offered feedback you can always ask to see if it is available. Even if the employer is not able to provide feedback, you may encourage them to offer it next time. If the results of your personality questionnaire are held on computer or in a filing system you can request the results using a data access request under the Data Protection Act. The requirement is to provide you with a meaningful explanation of the data held on you, which in this case would be an interpretation of your personality profile. Employers can ask you to pay up to £10 for the results of a data access request. See the Information Commissioner’s website for more details (www.ico.gov.uk).
Standards in the use of questionnaires
Personality questionnaires, like other psychometric instruments, are complex tools, which are difficult to create and should be used only by people who have appropriate training and skills. There are no legal constraints on publishing or using tests, but there are standards and guidelines that define a generally agreed benchmark of good practice.
A great deal of work goes into developing an effective test or questionnaire. A multi-stage iterative process is usually used in developing tests. First, it is important to develop questions that assess the appropriate personality traits. These are then subjected to detailed review and trialling on large groups of people. Comprehensive statistical analyses are performed to understand how well the questionnaires are working. Following this, the test is revised, and the reviews, trials and statistical analysis are repeated until the test can be seen to be fair and effective. It is difficult for an untrained person to assess the quality of a questionnaire, but the British Psychological Society publishes a register of tests that have been certified to reach a minimum quality standard. This can be accessed on the British Psychological Society Psychological Testing Centre website (www.psychtesting.org.uk). You can use this site to check if the test you have completed was registered; alternatively you can call on 0116252 9530. Because a test has not been registered does not mean it is a poor instrument, but reputable test publishers generally submit their tests and questionnaires for registration and review.
Questionnaires should not ask inappropriately intrusive questions or questions on topics that are not relevant to the world of work. Questions about your sexual fantasies, religious beliefs or childhood relationships should not be used in a personality questionnaire for standard occupational use. The questions should cover topics that you would feel comfortable talking about to a colleague at work. The individual questions are designed to sample your behaviour in a particular domain, and the specific content of each question is not of any particular relevance except as an example of the trait being measured. The employer will not be looking at your individual responses to questions but at the collated responses from a group of questions.
Employers should notify you that you will be asked to complete a test or questionnaire in advance. They should explain to you how and why the test is being used and what they will be doing with the scores. You should understand who will have access to your results and what will happen to them after the selection procedure is complete, whether you are successful or not. This should include a commitment to maintain the confidentiality of your results. They should also let you know how you can have access to your results.
Although there is no requirement to do so, it is considered good practice to provide test-takers with feedback on their results. This can be in the form of a written or oral report. If a written report is provided, candidates should be given contact details for a person who can help with any queries they may have about the report.
Test users should be trained in using tests and questionnaires. The training covers topics such as test selection, test administration and test interpretation. Reputable test publishers require proof of training to use tests before they will sell their instruments, and the British Psychological Society runs an accreditation scheme for test training. People who interpret personality questionnaires should have at least an Intermediate Level B Certificate of Competence. Test administrators require a lower level of qualification, a Test Administrators’ certificate. Again, this scheme is not mandatory, but you can check at the British Psychological Society Psychological Testing Centre website (www.psychtesting.org.uk) if the person interpreting your test is on the register. Individual test publishers also hold more comprehensive registers, but only of the people qualified to use their tests and questionnaires.
If you feel you have not been treated properly and fairly by an employer in their use of tests and questionnaires you should complain to the employer in the first instance. They are often concerned that applicants should feel they were assessed fairly – especially when applicants may also be potential customers. As an applicant, however, you have very few legal rights. You can choose to withdraw, of course, but there is little employment law that has reference to the selection process. If you feel you have been treated unfairly because of your race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation or because of a disability you can make a claim through an employment tribunal. (See www.employmenttribunals.gov.uk or www.acas.org.uk for more information or contact the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, www.cehr.org.uk.)
If you feel that the way the questionnaire was used was inappropriate you can contact the publisher. Most test publishers are concerned that their instruments are used properly, and they will sell questionnaires only to people who have had appropriate training. The test publisher may be able to tell you if the treatment you received was appropriate. In some cases they may wish to contact the employer to investigate further, and test publishers will refuse to supply tests to people who misuse them. The British Psychological Society will follow up any complaints about psychologists who are members of the society. However, it has little jurisdiction over people who have certificates of competence in testing who are not psychologists.
If you have been assessed internally within your organization for development purposes or other reasons and you feel your treatment was inappropriate you can use your company’s grievance procedure to raise any issues if an informal approach to the people responsible for the assessment is unsatisfactory. You can also contact your trade union representative if appropriate. As an employee you have more rights than an applicant. For instance, if the outcome of an assessment procedure was that you are made redundant, you have the right to be treated reasonably by the employer and can take complaints to employment tribunals if they are serious.
As well as expecting an employer to treat you with respect and consideration during an assessment procedure, you should consider your own behaviour in the testing session. In particular you should:
• Treat others with respect and courtesy during the assessment process. This includes both the representatives of the employer and other candidates whom you meet.
• Follow the instructions of the test administrator.
• Take responsibility for your own performance. Listen carefully to instructions. If you do not understand what you have to do, ask the administrator before you begin.
• Tell an appropriate person about anything that might invalidate the questionnaire results or that you would wish to have taken into consideration.
• Engage constructively with the assessment process.
Frequently asked questions
In this section there are answers to some of the common questions people ask about questionnaires. They are answered in more detail elsewhere.
What am I revealing about myself when I fill in a questionnaire?
Questionnaires used in an employment context are designed to elicit information about how someone would approach their work and fit into the organization. By completing a questionnaire you are just describing what you are like as a person and providing the type of information that someone who knew you well at work might be able to provide. Questionnaires used for employment purposes are not designed to provide insights into your private thoughts and fantasies. You should not encounter clinical psychological assessments, which
can be more intrusive.
Why are there so many questions in a test?
Questionnaires can be long, and some have hundreds of questions. Others are much shorter with perhaps a few tens of questions. There are a number of reasons for lengthy questionnaires. First, all things being equal, the longer the test the more accurate it is. Second, the more detailed the questionnaire the more aspects of personality it will assess, and it will therefore need more questions to make these finer distinctions. Third, the repeated inclusion of similar questions can be used to assess the consistency with which the questionnaire has been completed.
Why are some of the questions not relevant for the job I am applying for?
Because personality questionnaires are difficult and expensive to develop most employers use standard questionnaires, which they can buy from test publishers, rather than developing a measure tailored to their needs. Typically, these questionnaires will have a mix of relevant and irrelevant content for the job in question.
How do I know if the questionnaire I am asked to complete is reputable?
It is difficult for someone who is not trained in the use of tests to evaluate the effectiveness of an instrument. Test publishers can submit their tests to be registered as meeting minimum quality standards for use by the British Psychological Society. They can also submit a test for a detailed review. Reputable publishers generally do this. You can check whether the test you have taken is registered and/or see a précis of the test review at the British Psychological Society Psychological Testing Centre website (www.psychtesting.org.uk).
Are tests fair?
Questionnaire developers generally invest a lot of work in making sure that their instruments are accurate measures and do not suffer from biases of any kind. In general, standardized objective measures are much less open to bias than other methods of assessment an employer might use. For instance, interviews are, by their nature, subjective, and the prejudices of the interviewer can affect the results. In the past test developers were much less aware of issues of fairness and bias, and some early tests and questionnaires did contain inappropriate content. These instruments have typically either fallen out of use or have been revised.
Why won’t the employer tell me my actual score on a test?
Scores on tests and questionnaires are just numbers, and without an understanding of how these numbers are derived they are not meaningful. If you are told you scored 3 on a scale of a questionnaire this will not really help you understand what it means. Guidelines suggest that it is better to provide people with information about the meaning of their scores rather than the scores themselves.
Why won’t the employer give me feedback on my results?
It is good practice to provide people who have completed tests and questionnaires with some feedback on their results. This is becoming easier now that there are readily available computer-generated reports for most questionnaires. However, some employers do not do this because of the time required and the cost of providing the information when there are many candidates.
Are psychological questionnaires any better than horoscopes?
There is a great deal of objective research evidence to show that personality questionnaires can provide quite accurate information about people and that it is helpful in selecting the best candidates for jobs and supporting individual development. For example, studies on tens of thousands of people show that people with appropriate personality profiles perform better on jobs. There are also research studies that show that when people are provided with a standard report and told it is their own personalized personality profile they will often rate it as quite accurate. This shows that it is possible to create generalizations that many people find insightful. This could explain why many people find horoscopes quite persuasive, although there are hardly any employers who use this approach in selecting staff.
How do you interpret a questionnaire result?
This is a complex topic, and answering it is the main content of the training that people must undergo before they are allowed to use tests and questionnaires (see Chapter 5 for a fuller discussion). Most psychological questionnaires are assessed by comparing the individual’s response pattern to a known comparison group. This allows you to say whether the person has answered questions in a particular area, for instance, anxiety, in a more or less extreme manner than is typical of relevant others. It is possible to say whether people have described themselves as more anxious than 10 per cent of the population (so they have described themselves as quite relaxed and not very anxious) or more anxious than 90 per cent of the population (that is, they have described themselves as highly anxious). However, this is just the beginning of interpretation. The test user must go on to say what is the implication of this level of anxiety for the job – is it helpful to have a low, medium or high degree of anxiety in this role, or is anxiety not relevant to the role? In addition, it is important to look at the level of anxiety together with the other facets measured by the questionnaire. For instance, how does the person’s degree of structure interact with their degree of anxiety? Someone who is relaxed and unstructured may cope well with stressful situations but may be too laid back to get things done. Someone who is anxious and structured may be quite obsessively careful in their work. This can be very useful in safety-critical environments but can be an impediment where work needs to be delivered quickly. A shop assistant who takes hours lining up goods perfectly might be wasting time that could be used to encourage sales.
Isn’t there a danger of cloning when employers use personality questionnaires?
If employers were to specify the exact profile they were looking for on a personality questionnaire for a particular job there would be a danger of cloning. However, this is not the way that questionnaires are used. First, for any job only part of the profile will be relevant. Second, while employers may be looking for scores in a particular range on a scale, this range will be quite broad and encompass a degree of variation within it. Third, employers will often take on people who do not exactly match the criteria they set because they have other desirable qualities – skills and experience, immediate availability – or because they fit the profile better than other candidates assessed. Finally, many employers look at profiles qualitatively rather than in a fixed way. They use the information to better understand how a candidate might perform in the role without having a specific view of what their preferred personality type for the role is.
How can I practise completing a test and get some feedback?
Although there is benefit to be gained from practising reasoning tests of various sorts, there is no need to practise completing a personality questionnaire. Chapter 6 describes things to do to prepare for a test, but the difficulty in taking a test for practice is that proper personality questionnaires are carefully conserved to prevent them from being overused, so easily available tests, such as those that can be accessed on the web, are of variable quality. However, if you would like to try a short questionnaire as an example, the following link will allow you to do this: www.bbc.co.uk/science, then search for personality. This questionnaire is a short questionnaire developed to be like the commonly used type questionnaires.
The University of Waterloo in Canada has a site for students that allows you to self-assess your personality motivation and interests, although it isn’t quite like a standard questionnaire. See www.cdm.uwaterloo.ca/step1.asp. Some of the books in the Further Reading allow you to self-assess your personality in different ways.
Personality questionnaires prevent some people from getting jobs, don’t they?
A personality questionnaire is just a tool to help employers collect information about a candidate. There are no good or bad profiles; it is a question of appropriateness to job requirements. It is the employer who decides, based on this information and other sources, whether the candidate is suitable. You should remember that an employer will typically see between two and ten candidates for every vacancy, and they may have many more applicants
at the initial stages. This means that in the end most candidates will be rejected, no matter what selection method is used. Being rejected does not mean that you could not do the job. It simply means that the employer saw someone who, in their opinion, could do the job better than you. Often most of the candidates who apply for a job would be reasonably effective, and it is the nature of the selection process that many able people are rejected. If you are not having much success in applying for a job, try not to be too downhearted. It does not mean that you do not have potential. Always ask for feedback to try to understand why you have not been successful. Look for ways you can develop your skills and approach. At the same time, consider whether you are applying for the right sort of job and organization for you. There are many self-help materials to help you with a career search. See Further Reading for some suggestions.
How can I contact a test publisher?
The British Psychological Society Psychological Testing Centre website (www.psychtesting.org.uk) has a directory of test publishers with up-to-date contact details. The British Test Publishers Association also has a directory of members’ contact details on their website (www.btpa.org).
Further reading
Listed are a range of books about testing and tests, personality, the recruitment and selection process as well as some self-development books.
More about personality questionnaires and profiles
Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type, Isabell Briggs Myers and Peter Myers (Davies Black Publishing, 1995)
The Psychologist’s Book of Personality Tests: 24 Revealing Tests to Identify and Overcome Your Personal Barriers to a Better Life, Louis H. Janda (John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2001)