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Although popular especially among personnel consultants, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator has numerous psychometric deficiencies. More recently, a number of instruments based on the Five Factor Model of personality have been constructed such as the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. However, the Big Five and related Five Factor Model have been challenged for accounting for less than two-thirds of the known trait variance in the normal personality sphere alone.

A personality test can be administered directly to the person being evaluated or to an observer. In a self-report, the individual responds to personality items as they pertain to the person himself/herself. In an observer-report, a person responds to the personality items as those items pertain to someone else. To produce the most accurate results, the observer needs to know the individual being evaluated.

Each personality test has its own strong points when it comes to assessing how we’re wired. So access to that kind of data will bring you more self-awareness and allows you to maximize your core competencies and traits. Your personality type influences how you behave in certain situations, what emotions you feel and what attitude towards life guides you.

You can also take the assessment online at www.MBTIonline.com. If you are not in the USA you can find a distributor in your country through the The Myers-Briggs Company website. The Myers-Briggs Company licenses the international distributors worldwide who provide MBTI training, translations, and support materials.

Also, we recommend using personality testing for team selection wisely. This means not forgetting about your intuition and overall perception of your employees. For example, just because two workers seem to "get along" on paper based on their test results doesn’t mean they should always be grouped together or that they’ll have a harmonious interaction all the time.

After six months the applicants reapplied and completed the same personality test. The answers on the personality tests were compared and there was no significant difference between the answers. Direct observation involves a second party directly observing and evaluating someone else. The second party observes how the target of the observation behaves in certain situations (e.g., how a child behaves in a schoolyard during recess). The observations can take place in a natural (e.g., a schoolyard) or artificial setting . Direct observation can help identify job applicants (e.g., work samples) who are likely to be successful or maternal attachment in young children (e.g., Mary Ainsworth's strange situation).

At the very least, you need to make sure that you don’t blow your chances because one trait comes over as too extreme or inappropriate. This is overstating the case to the point of absurdity; very few people would even consider applying for a job which was totally unsuitable for them. Most of us find some aspects of our jobs require us to modify our preferred behavior. This is done to avoid giving the impression that there are right and wrong answers and that the test can be either passed or failed. However, even if we accept that these tests do have some shortcomings, we still need to know what they are trying to measure and why.