Introduction - Psychometric Analysis

There are many forms of personality/ psychometric analysis. Project Resource recommends the internationally recognised DISC version. A psychometric profile can be an excellent addition to your CV, employers will get a better understanding about what makes you tick and how you behave. You will also understand what information an employer will be looking at if you are asked to complete a personality or psychometric test as part of a job application.

The DISC personality profile

The DISC Profile is a personality testing technique that uses a simple questionnaire as a basis for revealing insights into a person's behaviour. Recruiters around the world have been using this personality test technique for decades, and now myDISCprofile gives you the chance to see your own DISC personality profile, prior to being asked to complete a similar test at interview.

A DISC personality profile can help you explore many different features of your own personal style, including your approach to home and work life, your communication style and motivation, your particular strengths, and a lot more besides.

Because so many recruiters use DISC as their preferred personality test, your profile can be a valuable job seeking aid also. Your DISC personality profile shows you the kind of information potential employers will have access to, helping you to plan your approach to maximise your potential.

Types of psychometric and personality tests

There are many ways of evaluating an individual's skills or approach, and predicting their likely behaviour from the results. At one end of the scale there are fairly simple personality tests designed to evaluate specific skills and abilities, such as an examination or driving test. At the other end of the scale lie batteries of psychometric tests, designed to build as complete a picture of a person's style and approach, in general terms, as possible. DISC lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. While it isn't a full 'personality test' in the strict technical sense, it provides an insight into an individual style that is more than adequate to predict likely trends of behaviour in the future. It does this by evaluating four key factors in an individual style, rather than the sixteen or more that are often seen in full personality tests (for example, DISC makes no attempt to measure such factors as intelligence).

This confers the advantage of greater accessibility: while a full test battery will often contain literally hundreds of questions, and take hours to complete, a DISC personality profile questionnaire contains only twenty-four questions, and can be usually be performed in fifteen minutes or less. This also provides advantages in the area of interpretation; while the interpretation of results from a full test remains in the province of experts, DISC results are sufficiently well-defined that their interpretation can be almost completely automated.

What can DISC tell me?

At its most basic level, DISC measures four factors of an individual's behaviour: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. These behaviours are fairly complex constructs, and aren't easily expressed in single words, but they can be simply characterised as assertiveness, communication, patience and structure.

The real power of DISC, though, comes from its ability to interpret the relations between these factors, for example where a highly Dominant person has an equally high level of Influence, they will behave quite differently to an equally Dominant individual without that Influence. Using this information, a DISC profile can be used to describe a person's general approach, including their motivations and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, and some of the basic assumptions they make about other people. It can also go far in helping to predict how a person will react to a specific set of circumstances.

Once you have completed the DISC personality profile questionnaire you can view your personal DISC report. The Classic myDISCprofile report gives an in-depth analysis into your personal style and behaviour, you can also choose to upgrade to an Enhanced report which contains a more detailed analysis, including sections on specific work areas such as sales and service (recommended test). MyDISC profile also offers you the chance to purchase a professional PDF version of your report, which can be used to supplement your CV (or résumé) for job applications.

As well as these report options, MyDISC profile offers you the chance to compare your profile against particular job roles to explore your suitability to that role.

DISC applications: career development

There are a number of ways in which DISC personality testing can be used to help in business-oriented matters, mostly relating in some way to either the recruitment or assessment of staff. Outside this corporate arena, however, DISC also has possibilities in terms of personal development. The clearest example of this is in helping with an individual's career development. In this section we will look briefly at the ways in which the DISC personality test technique can help a person decide on a career path.

It is important to note that there are a multitude of factors that affect the decisions a person takes about their career. DISC personality testing alone cannot provide a definitive conclusion, but it is able to provide guidance in deciding whether a particular career path is suited to an individual or not. DISC personality profile results tend to be less reliable for young people under the age of twenty or so, because before this age the personal style tends to be in something of a state of flux. The precise age at which the behavioural type reaches a stable form will vary from individual to individual.

In its simplest terms, using personality testing for career development is a very similar process to that seen in recruitment or assessment scenarios. A person's DISC profile series is compared against an ideal Job Profile for a particular career, and the closeness of the match between the two styles will give an indication of how well that individual's style is suited to the career area in question.