The Conference was a fantastic success Max Choi and Alan Howard presented their paper: An Alternative to Personality Questionnaires: Introducing Personality Tasks (OPT’s) to a packed audience.

Assessment Centres are often supported with personality questionnaires and such questionnaires have been used for many, many decades. But is this really the best way to assess personality in high stakes recruitment? After all, they are self-report questionnaires. Therefore, they are relatively easy for candidates to manipulate or to fake even. Also, everyone has blind spots or poor self-awareness – so we may introduce a lot of error with these self-report tools. Max and Alan have been researching and developing an alternative, more direct method of assessing personality.  First of all, respondents are asked to complete tasks – known as Objective Personality Tasks (OPT’s). It is not obvious what the tasks are measuring, and typically one just focuses on performing the tasks. As a result, we measure real and natural behaviours which underpins one’s personality.

Max and Alan described how they developed OPT’s. They included the research to date, to assess the Big Five personality factors. Most noteworthy, how they are assessing important personality areas required by organisations. Delegates were shown some of the new OPT’s the latest innovative, new approach to accurately assessing personality.