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.

Look around you – how many people can you see truly enjoying their jobs? How many of your friends tell you about their working day with joy and excitement? Sadly, the majority of people in the UK feel they are in the wrong job or that they are not tapping into their full potential. This perception is common among new job starters, who quickly become disillusioned with the reality of their chosen career, as well as among more senior employees who, with time and increased self-awareness, often begin to realise the misfit between their strengths or interests and the job they have chosen.

Imagine you’ve turned up for an interview; you’ve prepared carefully, you’ve thought about your strengths, weakness, and examples of your competence in different areas. The interviewer greets you and then says to you: “Dance for me”, or: “See the large Telecom Tower, over there - if it fell over, could it hit us?”, or: “How many ping-pong balls do you think would fit in this room?” All of these are real-life examples of recruitment interview questions or demands that someone, sometime, thought were a good idea.

With the final of The Apprentice tonight we ask: what does it take to be an entrepreneur? The gruelling process of The Apprentice may entertain us, but it’s a long way from answering the question. So we’ve taken on the challenge and devised our own ‘Entrepreneurial Top Five’.

OPP recently carried out research looking at the extent to which ambition and personality predict career success. It is often assumed that the three elements are linked, but this was an opportunity to explore the evidence.

University application figures in England have taken a plunge following the recent increase in university tuition fees. Applications for a university place fell by 8% in 2012, and were the lowest they had been in six years. Given the financial burden a university education now entails, it has never been more important for a prospective university student to feel confident that they are embarking on the right course. But whilst an array of research exists on the subject of career choice in general, little is known about how students choose their university course. Universities in turn want to be confident that the students they recruit will be satisfied with their chosen course, and see their studies through to fruition – so we decided to find out how personality affects young people’s course choice.

Employers despair at how unprepared graduates are, and how ill-equipped they seem to be for taking control of their career paths and longer-term development. Modern companies expect individuals to be in the driving seat, to know themselves and to have a clear idea of what they want to achieve. And yet, without good career services in schools and colleges, how can young people get the insights and self-knowledge they so desperately need?

How comfortable would you feel about your personality being reduced down to just one score from 1 to 10? The top end of the scale would describe a more desirable personality, the bottom end... well, sorry... undesirable. Perhaps you could wear your number on a badge. Surely this would save a lot of time at cocktail parties and speed-dating events?

If you happened to be listening this morning to BBC Radio 4’s award-winning news and analysis programme Today, you may have heard claims that handwriting analysis can help you make better recruitment decisions.
During the programme, a graphologist was featured who made some impressive claims for the effectiveness of this method. Proponents of graphology suggest that the distinctive shapes of our handwriting give us very specific insights into our personalities, and therefore our potential fit with particular jobs.

This rings a few alarm bells with psychologists working in the psychometrics industry. We too claim to be able to make accurate predictions about future job performance using the tools and skills available to us… but are we really using similar methods? And can graphology really make plausible links between handwriting and fit with a particular role?

Using psychometrics in selection still polarises opinion. OPP's CEO Penny Moyle sets out to debunk some myths.

Reports suggest that rising youth unemployment is creating a ‘lost generation’ of young people.

Unconscious bias influences the choices we make about others in our everyday lives.

New and innovative approaches to recruitment have real benefits, but should not replace traditional methods.

Regardless of gender, physical apperance has an evident effect on how people are treated in the workplace.

Employers offering graduate training schemes and even tailored degree courses to recruit and on-board their staff invest a lot of money in developing a 'tame' working population. But what can these employers do to ensure they retain and motivate those employees that have been brought in at such an early age?

Members of Gen Y who have been stuck in career plateaus are likely to try and move on to bigger and better things once we're out of recession.

Contrary to popular belief, a person's handshake doesn't reveal much at all about their personality.

Though a candidate may, on paper, have all the qualities required for a role, their personality may not be as suitable.