Careers

New research sends clear message to team leaders

Why well-being is crucial to employee and organizational performance

The Myers-Briggs Company is launching a new podcast about psychology, personality, work life, and how to get the best from life. 

If not, you might be part of a hybrid strategy that’s about to fail.

As employees return to the office, they’re expecting more flexibility in their social contracts with employers. How can HR help?

What happens at the intersection of race, type and leadership? 

Celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week

Reflections on the first 18 months of an MBTI practitioner.

The BBC, Norway and a tech start-up who is bucking the trend.

Any MBTI type can do any job and bring different strengths to the table

Exploring the glass ceiling using MBTI data.

A robot workforce with personality? Where does the MBTI framework fit in?

1.5 billion people in the world own a smartphone. That’s almost 20% of the world’s population; and in the US and Europe, 60% of the population own one. Such a ubiquitous device has become part of our daily lives. Many of us have it on hand at all times to check the weather forecast, get directions, access our text and email messages and read the latest news. Indeed, the average user spends three hours per day on a smartphone and 15% of all global internet traffic originates from smartphones.

How do you best represent yourself to potential employers? How do you bring your professional reputation to the forefront? Up to now, the answer has been to craft and polish a CV. However, we know that prospective employers are likely to spend just eight seconds reading each CV submitted with a job application. The new way to get yourself noticed is to display your qualifications on a site like LinkedIn with the use of digital badges.

Visits to our Personality Matters blog were at an all-time high in 2014, and we covered a wide range of topics in our weekly posts. Over the last 12 months we've talked about the best MBTI-based books and the various resources available for L&D teams. We’ve promoted Movember, and we’ve commented on the Paul Flowers furore. We've also continued to thrive as thought leaders in a diverse range of workplace psychology issues, from recruitment and assessment centres to polarity management. But what are the top five posts that readers have returned to again and again?

Few things in life are free – but OPP has some really cool free resources to support you in your work! To help celebrate our 25 years in the business, we’ve taken a trawl through the various goodies available for zero outlay on our website. They range from white papers and feedback materials to fun quick guides and infographics – many of which can also be found on our practitioner downloads page.

There is a large and growing body of evidence that psychometric tests and questionnaires are among the best recruitment tools you can use. Incorporating psychometric tools on top of structured interviews and other objective assessments adds real value by increasing the quality of each hire – as well as helping you to avoid big recruitment mistakes. So it is good news that the most recent CIPD Resourcing and Talent Planning Report shows that over half of all the organisations surveyed do use ability tests or personality questionnaires in selection.

We all enjoy fanciful nonsense from time to time. Perhaps as a child you held a buttercup under a friend’s chin and declared that they liked butter. Some of these myths we grow out of, others we come to cherish; many of these are the foundations of pseudoscience. Unfortunately, the BBC’s journalists don’t seem immune. In my humble opinion, the latest offering from the BBC's Business section is the equivalent of holding a cow under your friend’s chin to see if they like milk.

According to a recent CIPD report, job turnover has slowed significantly over the past 15 years. This means that, in general, people are choosing to stay in their current roles rather than make voluntary exits (ie resignations and retirement). On the surface it might appear to be nothing but good news for an organisation that much-valued members of staff are choosing to stay. However, for this to be a wholly positive trend, people need to be staying put for the right reasons...

That’s one of the questions I posed to delegates at the European Association of Test Publishers (E-ATP) at their annual conference two weeks ago. I’ll tell you later how they answered. I was looking at the future of the recruitment industry and how the method of searching for top talent has been changing rapidly over the past two years.