Creating pre-employment personality tests customized to your organization

By Joanna, FlexiQuiz.
4 minute read.

Are you looking for an effective way to employ people who have a good personality fit to your organization?

Online personality tests are a popular way to screen job candidates by helping hiring managers identify the person who is the right fit for the business and role. A well-crafted personality test can reveal a candidate's primary character traits and motivations that a resume alone can't always demonstrate.

Many organizations use personality tests to find the best candidates from a large pool of applicants, and face-to-face meetings are not always practical.

By building a custom personality test for your company, you're able to:

• Create better content with questions relevant to your sector, organization, and role.
• Cost-effectively test a large volume of candidates.
• Provide a positive experience for candidates that reflects your companies values and brand.

This blog talks through the process of creating an online personality test that measures employee's strengths.

8 steps to create a personality test that measures employees key behaviors

Identify behaviors that you want to measure

To start, you will need to decide which behaviors you would like to assess. You can choose to align the behaviors to your organization's values, company culture or to identify interpersonal characteristics required for a specific role.

These are some popular examples of behaviors that companies use to measure a candidate's fit within the business:

• Ability to take ownership
• Customer commitment
• Collaboration
• Leadership skills
• Motivations
• Respect for authority
• Levels of creativity

A personality test can also identify any negative traits such as pessimism, bossiness, and self-doubt.

Draft your questions and answer options

The next step is to design questions that will provide the best insight for measuring your chosen behaviors.

Typically each question measures one strength or two strengths that are opposites. An example of opposite strengths could be, are you a 'extravert' or 'introvert'?

There are various ways to format your questions that will enable you to best measure the person's behavior, such as:

• Multiple choice
• Picture choice
• Rating score
• Yes/ no options
• Fill-in-the-blanks
• Free text

It would be best if you ended up with various sets of questions, split by behavior.

Start building the personality test online

Once you've drafted the questions, it's easy for you to add them to the FlexiQuiz system. The system enables you to present the questions clearly and concisely, making it easy for participants to work through.

Log into your FlexiQuiz account. From your main dashboard, press Create quiz and enter a name for your personality assessment.

You can choose to add a welcome page that provides the test-taker with some directions for taking the assessment and what to expect next. A welcome page can include an outline of the test such as time limits, a company video, or outline the types of questions being asked.

When you're ready to start adding your questions, press Add item and select Question from the drop-down menu. Choose which FlexiQuiz question type best fits your personality questions.

This image shows an example of a multiple-choice question where the participant can select one answer option.

You can also bring the question to life by adding images, video, and audio.

How to measure the behaviors

One of the main advantages of sharing personality tests online, is that the system can automatically measure the test-takers behaviors based on the rules you set.

With FlexiQuiz, the behavior is measured using a points scoring system. Although points are not typically awarded based on right or wrong answers as the test is measuring various ways people react in fictional situations.

To reflect this measure, you need to allocate points for each answer option. Check the box set option points. Add a set number of points next to each answer option. Usually, the higher the number of points awarded, the more extreme the behavior.

Companies may not always want people to score 100% on the assessment as it can show dominant strengths rather than a more balanced personality.

Assigning questions to a category

Once you've set how many points you would like to award each question, the system needs to be told which behavior the item measures.

With FlexiQuiz, each question is added to a category and the category represents a behavior. For example, if I add 20 questions to the collaboration category. When someone takes the test, the system adds all of the points in the collaboration category to measure how well they can work with others.

To add your chosen behaviors to the system, go to the Create tab and press Add Item; select Question Bank from the drop-down menu. This option opens your question bank, press Add category, and add the name of the behavior you would like to measure. Repeat this for every behavior that you would like to measure.

To assign your question to a behavior, return the question box and check the box set categories. Choose the relevant behavior/ category where you would like to post the question.

Configure and style your test

FlexiQuiz offers a wide choice of advanced configuration and styling options that enable you to design a test that meets your objectives and reflects your company branding.

These are some popular features used to configure personality test:

• Add a timer to get an instant reaction from participants.
• A progress bar that allows participants to track their position during a long test.
• Prevent previous page navigation to minimize the ability of participants being able to find a formula that doesn't fairly reflect their personality.

By creating your own personality test, you can style it how you would like to. The questions and navigation instructions can also reflect your companies tone of voice. FlexiQuiz offers many styling options including, add your company logo, colors, and text. Enterprise members can also use Google fonts.

Distribute your test

Once you're ready to share the test, go to the Publish tab and choose how you would like to distribute the test.

Popular ways to distribute a pre-employment personality test are:

• Embed the quiz on the jobs page of your company website.
• Send an email direct from your FlexiQuiz account to invite candidates to complete the test.

Sharing and analyzing results

You can choose to share results with test-takers that provides them with insights on their strengths and weaknesses.

Or you can choose not to share any data and once the quiz is submitted, direct participants to another URL or custom thank you page.

If you would like to share results with the test-taker, follow these simple steps:

• Go to the Configure tab and select Results from the left-hand menu.
• Check the boxes, show results page, and Category scores only. Leave everything else unticked.

Participants will see a results screen that looks something like this:

To view the category or behavior scores as an administrator, follow these simple steps:

• Go to the Settings screen and select General from the left-hand menu.
• Check the box, show category scores.
• Return to the analyze screen, press select action and choose view from the drop-down menu.

And that's how to create, configure, and analyze a personality test unique to your company!

Make your a custom personality test for your organization.