You’ve been searching for a job for months. You’ve sent out CVs, scanned online job boards until your eyes are bleary and sat through enough interviews to qualify you as a talk show host. But still, that elusive “great job” has not appeared. Rather than go over ground you may have covered already, we have a suggestion: find online personality and career choice assessments to fine-tune your job search.
Now maybe you have some experience with these assessments, like taking some Career Orientation Test in high school and college. But that was then. You’ve changed, and so have the tests.
Your need now is to find ways that can refine your job search, to play more to your strengths and make sure you aren’t ignoring potential avenues that can lead to great success for you. You might also be feeling a little downtrodden, a bit rejected, and though that’s normal, it doesn’t reflect on your value and worth as a contributor: all it means is that the right opportunity is still out there. Now’s the time to invest in yourself, maybe learn a few things about you and re-energize your job search.
The Internet has dozens of sites offering personality and career assessment tests. Most of them are free, so there’s really no need to make this expensive. A popular personality assessment instrument is called the Briggs-Meyer Test and it is used by many companies to evaluate employees and candidates. You can start with that one and move on to several others, but you’re not taking the tests just to pass the time, you’re doing it for two important reasons:
- See what trends appear in both personality and career: If you take a few tests results say you are extroverted and risk-averse, use that consistency to re-evaluate your job search. Are you playing to your strengths (extroverts like to socialize and be engaged by other people) while minimizing your weaknesses (risk-averse folks tend to favor a steady paycheck over commission, for example). You may have known these things, but use the tests to compare and contrast the results. You’ll be looking at yourself with “new eyes” and that can lead to an excellent series of new ideas.
- Use the information to craft the job description you are best suited for: What you’re doing here is placing yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager who looks at the test results and says “This is where you fit in.” By analyzing your results and thinking about how’d look to the person hiring you, you are also evaluating the kinds of jobs you would be close to perfect for. Are these the jobs you’ve been looking for? Great! Proceed with confidence. If they’re not, now you know what to look for, so proceed with confidence.
Tests, no matter how good they are or how many you take, are never going to be able to capture you in all your talented glory. But they can help you orient all that good stuff in the right direction, for the right reasons, in order to find the right job.
By Gil C. Schmidt, Sharpline Contributor
