In this post you will discover just how clever the PeopleMaps Personality Questionnaire really is.

It took years of refinement to get it to the format you see today. Many iterations were gone through since 2001.

7 Reasons The PeopleMaps Personality Questionnaire Is More Advanced

There are other questionnaires out there but we are going to explore what makes the PeopleMaps personality questionnaire so special.

No 1 – A Personality questionnaire designed for the Internet from Day 1

PeopleMaps dragged personality profiling into the 21st century. Unlike any other professional profiling system out there the PeopleMaps personality questionnaire was designed for the Internet from the outset.

personality-questionnaireThere never was a paper based version of the PeopleMaps personality questionnaire. This questionnaire was not cobbled together and forced to fit online. It was designed for the online age. PeopleMaps pioneered online personality profiling. When the old guard were saying “It can’t be done” or “it shouldn’t be done”, PeopleMaps was doing it.

The coding works better. It loads fast. It works every time. It doesn’t crash. These are just some of the benefits of designing the questionnaire from the outset.

 

 

No 2 – It’s incredibly fast

Where thirty or forty minutes is perfectly acceptable in a classroom scenario where the candidate is sitting with a pen and a paper-based questionnaire, it’s simply unacceptable when you move online.

Ten minutes is too long in Internet time. The PeopleMaps questionnaire typically takes about 5 minutes to complete.

PeopleMaps is the fastest professional personality questionnaire on the market.

Being quick matters. If you take too long then candidates get bored, which affects their results.

No 3 – It uses simple language

The PeopleMaps Questionnaire was designed so that 12-year-olds would cope with it. In a recent survey of over 100 job applicants, more than 90% responded that they understood 95% of the words or more. We do provide help with the vocabulary if people needed it. we are not trying to test their understanding of English language, so it’s fine to look up words they are unsure of.

No 4 – It requires no explanation

If you have to explain it then you are already doomed. People do not read instructions even if you provide them. Questionnaires need to be intuitive. It has to be so obvious that people simply complete it without having to scratch their head.

PeopleMaps designed the questionnaire to be step-by-step and therefore simple to follow. It only flows in one direction. People can only take one step at a time.

Again, in a recent survey of 100 people, we discovered that most people didn’t read the instructions and > 95% understood exactly what they had to do, while the other 5% soon figure it out.

No 5 – It can be embedded in your own site

Internet technology is amazing and it gives you the opportunity to try things that you could never do on an old fashioned questionnaire.

One of the features of the PeopleMaps personality questionnaire is that you may embed it in your own website.

You are provided with a small string of code that you simply copy and paste. Wherever you paste it, the questionnaire appears in a small box of 300 x 320.

No 6 –  It’s incredibly accurate

So by now, you may be thinking if it’s so fast, it can’t be as accurate. Well, the opposite is true. The reports are incredibly accurate. This is why we gently insist everyone try it for themselves before buying anything. You will be astounded by how accurate the reports are.

The eminent psychologist, Paul Kline released a report a few years ago that indicated long questionnaires introduce candidate fatigue and this seriously affects the results.

But it’s the clever design of the questionnaire that lets us gather a lot of data from each click, that lets us produce such accurate reports. It is much more sophisticated than an A/B test.

Most systems provide pairs of statements and ask you to pick A or B. To get accuracy from this approach you need a lot of statement pairs. PeopleMaps is much more sophisticated than this, as you are prioritising four pairs of words each time.

No 7 – The answers are not obvious

Professionals refer to this as face validation. However, what we are talking about here is how obvious the statements are.

Ideally, you should present statements that make the user think but that contain no blatantly obvious “wrong answers”. or blatantly obvious “correct answers”. This is extremely difficult to do. However, PeopleMaps has succeeded with this and all feedback and user experiences bare this out.

One spin-off is that the questionnaire is very difficult to cheat. To cheat a questionnaire you need to know what the recipient/employer is looking for and you need to know how to engineer your answers in order to give them what they want.

With the PeopleMaps questionnaire it is unlikely that they could achieve step one, never mind step two. In our experience over the last 20 years, we find that people simply answer the questions, without trying to second guess the system. Thousands of organisations have used the system and people trying to “cheat the system” simply doesn’t come up in practice.

Further Reading

See how we made a Personality Test that is easy to use.

This article has been about the PeopleMaps personality questionnaire.

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