What You Need to Know About the Career Assessment
When you apply for certain jobs, the company that you apply with may require you to take a career assessment. These are often viewed with trepidation, but they are actually a vital tool for the company when it comes to selecting candidates for the positions they have open.Statistically speaking, the way that you answer certain questions will illustrate your personality and your strengths and weaknesses, and this means that if you answer certain questions in certain ways, you are either telling the company that you are statistically a good match for the job, or you are completely wrong for it. This information alone can make the assessment a nerve wracking experience, so knowing how to approach these can be a big boost to your job search.
First of all, don’t think of this as an “us versus them” thing. Yes, the test does have a bearing on whether you get hired or not, but not in a way that is detrimental to you. Not only are companies trying to see if you are a good fit for them, they are attempting to see if they are a good fit for you. In this way, the career assessment is actually a blessing in disguise. It has the potential to save you from wasting time at a job that you will hate.
Depending on the type of career you are applying to, the questions will be different. A sales job will likely attempt to see if you have a built in audience that you can use to increase your clientele and what your people skills are like. A career assessment for a managerial position will likely try to figure out how emotionally mature and intelligent you are to ensure that you can make tough decisions without letting your judgment be clouded. Other jobs will likely ask different types of questions and be looking for different information. Some will ask you how you would describe certain aspects of your personality or your feelings about certain things. Others will ask how you would respond in a given situation. They are almost always multiple choice. These questions are not always easy to decipher what they are looking for, but the best designed tests have math on their side. Statistically speaking, if you do well on one of these, you are disposed toward success in that particular career. If you do poorly, history indicates that you are likely to not be a success in the career path that you are looking at. Are these things set in stone? Absolutely not. They show where you are now emotionally and physically.
Is it possible to “beat” these tests? Of course it is. But you really shouldn’t try to do that. First of all, in many cases you don’t know for certain what the test is looking for. You might have a general idea, but not always. Putting down untrue answers just to try and increase your chances of getting hired is not going to help you in the long run, either. For one, this increases the chances of going into a career that not only will you not be good at, but one that you will despise. Your time will be better spent filling everything out honestly so that you can spend your time and energy on refining your job search to discover a better opportunity.
If you do poorly on the assessment, but you feel that you would still thrive at that particular career, you should speak to someone within human resources at the company so that you can get a better idea of what the next steps for you, if any, should be.