A personality test is generally used to explore respondents’ strengths and weaknesses, talents, skills and motivations. It is based on a questionnaire and can be implemented easily as an online survey.
Depending on the purpose, a personality test can be used professionally or simply for entertainment:
- Assess personality traits in other people, for example in recruitment tests and assessment centres
- Explore your own personality, for example with an entertaining self-test such as “Which season type are you?” or “What type of holidaymaker are you?”
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Why use a personality test in your organisation?
Personality tests are used in working life for purposes including recruitment and employee assessment. They can help examine traits that may influence behaviour and motivation at work.
The aim: to assess people and professionally relevant characteristics in a structured way.
Typical areas include:
- Career orientation: achievement motivation, motivation to shape and influence work, leadership motivation
- Work behaviour: conscientiousness, action orientation, flexibility
- Social skills: sensitivity, interpersonal skills, sociability, team orientation, assertiveness
- Psychological disposition: emotional stability, resilience, self-confidence
For this reason, recruitment decisions often consider more than professional qualifications alone. Teamwork, the ability to accept criticism, flexibility and resilience may also play a role.
All you need to get started is an email address and a password.
Personality tests in recruitment
Soft skills have become increasingly important to employers because interdisciplinary teams with different personalities need to work effectively together. Personality tests can support team composition by helping to analyse individual characteristics in a structured way. It is important to use recognised instruments such as the BIP (Bochum Inventory for Job-related Personality Description). Applicants may also find recognised instruments harder to manipulate deliberately.
The role of personality tests in EU companies
The cited research reports that one quarter of companies in western EU countries used personality tests, including more than half of large companies, and described their use as increasing.
(Sources: “Persönlichkeitstests auf dem Prüfstand”; Sandra Schmid: Stellungnahme Persönlichkeitstests - Ein personaldiagnostisches Instrument im Rahmen der Personalauswahl. Zurich University of Applied Sciences, 2006.)
What are the benefits of running personality tests online?
Benefits of running a personality test with LamaPoll
Why create and run your personality test with LamaPoll? LamaPoll offers a range of advantages compared with other providers:
- For personality test analysis, results can be processed flexibly.
- With LamaPoll, you can export results in common formats.
- You can adjust variables and coding yourself at any time.
- Multiple-choice questions can be combined with scoring.
- Analyses and follow-up questions can be displayed based on response behaviour and, where applicable, personality profiles.
- LamaPoll offers a high level of security and data protection, supported by the location of our servers and company in Germany. Your data remains in Germany.
- Only you can remove or edit the data at any time.
- LamaPoll is a modular and highly customisable online survey tool.
- You have access to source code and CSS and can adjust the size, colours and structure of the survey and its elements yourself.
All you need to get started is an email address and a password.
Personality tests as entertainment on a website
Personality tests can also be used purely for entertainment. Websites often use light-hearted type tests to give customers something different to do and draw attention to products in a playful way. Self-tests such as “Which colour type are you?” or “Which season suits you?” are also sometimes combined with prize draws to increase interest.
Would you like to run an entertaining personality or type test? Use our template as inspiration: “Summer or winter? Which season type are you?”
