Three questionnaires sit apart from everything else in the library. None of them is scored, none enters the overall score, and none has a right answer.
The personality questionnaire
A set of statements the candidate rates. It returns a profile across work-related traits, each with a band, a percentile, a description and a suggested interview question.
Untimed. Candidates take as long as they take, and there is nothing to rush towards.
Use it for the conversation it gives you at interview. Reading it is covered in interpret personality results.
The drives questionnaire
Candidates distribute a fixed pool of points across the things that motivate them most at this point in their career. Because the pool is fixed, the answers are relative: more of one necessarily means less of another.
Use it for retention and fit conversations before an offer. Reading it is covered in interpret drives results.
Interest inventory
Describes the kinds of work activities and environments a candidate prefers, across six dimensions. A statement of preference, not of ability.
Useful for early-career hiring and for graduate schemes with several tracks, where the question is which part of the business someone belongs in.
Where these belong in a process
After the scored tests, before the interview. They are not a filter and they are poor ones. Their value is in giving you a specific, non-generic question to ask a person you were going to interview anyway.
What not to do with these results
- Do not rank candidates on a trait. The instruments do not support it and the product says so on the report.
- Do not build a profile of your best performers and hire to match it. That is how a team becomes uniform, and the evidence that it improves hiring is weak.
- Do not screen on traits that can correlate with disability, health or neurodivergence. As well as being a bad idea, it can be unlawful discrimination.
What candidates experience
Longer than they expect, because there are many statements, and untimed. Some candidates find them uncomfortable. Saying in your welcome message that they are not pass or fail helps.
The candidate side is explained in the personality questionnaire and the drives questionnaire.