Many airlines now use personality tests at the recruitment stage. Do you stand a chance?

HOW TO ACE THE PERSONALITY PSYCHOMETRIC TESTS

We all know that our daily jobs require us to modify our preferred behaviour. It could be you have to be more assertive at work than you really feel comfortable with. The point is we can deal with the demands of the work place by adopting a work personality. 

We accept that our work place is not about living within our ‘comfort zone’ as we do with friends or at home, and we all have the ability to step outside of our natural comfort zone in order to get our day job done effectively.

So, I keep getting asked should we try to influence the psychometric test results to operate outside of our real home personality type? Our personal experience tells us that most of us are able to behave very differently between home and the workplace.

For example, consider this typical statement.

1) It's easy for my colleagues or customers to see my moods.

A) Strongly Disagree
B) Disagree
C) Neutral
D) Agree
E) Strongly Agree

You should answer this question from a workplace perspective. In other words you may be more expressive at home about your moods, but you have to be much more guarded at work e.g. a customer service role, then make this clear in your answer by selecting C or B rather than D.

Now either you have the ‘right’ personality or you get rejected in favour of someone else at the Open Day who has. Recruiters will always tell you there are no right and wrong answers and this is actually not totally true.

If you want the cabin crew role, then you had better find out what is Emirates looking for and make sure that your personality questionnaire answers reflect the traits they are looking for. BUT BEWARE: You need to make sure that you don’t blow your chances because one trait comes over as too extreme or totally inappropriate for the cabin crew role.

As we know, Emirates is looking for individuals to be of a certain ‘type’ and the type they require is written in the job description on their website. What they don't tell you is they will be using the answers of your personality questionnaires to reject anyone who doesn’t fit with the corporate image that they want to promote. So, in short, you may or may not be the "right-fit" in their cabin crew team.

You must highly score on traits that the job requires. You need to make sure that your personality questionnaire answers won’t cause any ‘red-flags’ to appear. 

They use the answers from your personality tests to probe into a few more areas to see that you have good examples to back up certain traits that you say you are strong at.

If you come across well, the traits they test you on correlates with the examples you provide at your final interview, well done! You will get the shortest lead time from FI to the golden call. They really rate you highly and will not risk losing you to their competitor airline.

So what are the takeaways from this lesson here - I would say know the traits well, prepare real situational examples from work that backs up the personality they are after.

Please add your comments and experience below.

If you need help with the Psychometric and personality test and would like a one to one session, send us a note here and explain what you are after and we will help you.

Many employers, including Emirates use the personality test to filter out applicants that are not team fit. We show you the way to get around the system.