PSYCHOMETRIC TESTING
The Five Factor Model
The Five Factor Model of Personality Testing is a computer
scored personality testing system which has been developed
specifically for use in business organizations, and is now
being widely used in the United States of America by companies
as diverse as AT&T and Disneyland and in Trinidad and
Tobago by companies such as Lever Brothers West Indies Limited
(manufacturing), R.K. Plummer and Associates Limited (construction),
CARDI (research) and Scotiabank (finance). We recommend
its use because of its high reliability rates in predicting
employees’ performance in particular jobs.
This enables you to be more cost effective
in recruiting the right people for the right jobs and in
making decisions which save time and money when it comes
to training, development and promotion. The test can be
also used for career development where the information provided
about an individual’s personality is used to identify
careers which are consistent with personality, and which
may therefore result in a high level of job satisfaction
and productivity.
The Five Factor Personality Test is a psychometric
testing system that assesses personality dynamics on five
different factors: Negative Emotionality, Extraversion,
Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.
The Negative Emotionality factor gives insight
into how a person handles negative emotions such as anger,
worry and stress.
The Extraversion factor assesses the person’s
preference for interpersonal interaction (for example, whether
they prefer to work with other people or whether they prefer
a more solitary environment).
The Openness factor assesses the person’s
preference for working with new ideas and their general
intellectual curiosity.
The Agreeableness factor gives insight into
how the person tends to relate to others, especially those
in authority (for example, aggressive and altruistic tendencies).
The fifth factor, Conscientiousness, assesses
a person’s work habits. This factor gives insight
into whether a person may be more focused or flexible in
their attitudes towards work related tasks.
Each of the five domains is represented by six, more specific
scales that measure facets of the domain. The multifaceted
approach to the measurement of the five factors has several
advantages including: allowing each domain to cover a wide
range of relevant thoughts, feelings and actions; ensuring
internal replication of findings; and the identifying meaningful
individual differences within domains.
As we all know, a candidate can have the academic and length
of experience qualifications but not fit in with the culture,
the clients, or the stresses of a particular job. The Job
Profiling application in Five Factor Personality Testing
takes much of the uncertainty out of recruitment choices.
Because it benefits from the objective impartiality of a
computer application, it also provides an answer to charges
that recruitment choices have been politically or ethnically
biased.
The Job Profile consists of thirty statements
related to the thirty facets measured by the Five Factor
Model, followed by five descriptions, each of which represents
an area of a personality trait continuum. There descriptors
are used to establish the company’s preferred personality
profile for a particular job. The test takers results are
matched to the profile following testing.
TESTING PROCEDURE FOR RECRUITMENT OR PROMOTION
