Peter Pre­vos, 1 April 2011.

The holy grail of human resource man­age­ment is to find the per­fect staff mem­ber. Count­less of books are devoted to the recruit­ment pro­cess and pre­dict­ing per­form­ance based on inter­views, résumés, ref­er­ence checks and psy­cho­met­ric test­ing. At Hypo­thet­icorp we have writ­ten sev­eral art­icles about the mach­in­a­tions of recruit­ment.

Psy­cho­met­ric test­ing, mostly in the form of a self admin­istered per­son­al­ity test are a very pop­u­lar way help recruit­ers find the right per­son for the job. Most pop­u­lar is the Meyers-Brigs Type Indic­ator (MBTI) and mil­lions of hard work­ing pro­fes­sion­als have been branded with labels such as ENTP, INTJ or pos­sibly FCUK.

Unfor­tu­nately these tests are noth­ing more than expens­ive secur­ity blankets for recruit­ers and man­agers that don’t have the cour­age to rely on per­sonal judge­ment and need pseudo sci­ence to defend their decisions. Personality does exist as a phe­nomenon, but there is no easy tech­nique to determ­ine this and pre­dict future beha­viour or work performance.

How­ever, at Hypo­thet­icorp we decided to join the mad­ness and develop our own per­son­al­ity test based on groun­ded the­ory research con­duc­ted over the past four years. Dif­fer­ence is that this test is fully open source. You can read all about the inner work­ings of the FWI on the back­ground page.

So, hop on our vir­tual divan and answer 22 easy ques­tions to find our what your Forer Work­style Invent­ory is.