How Knowing Your Personality Type Can Help You in an Interview

How Knowing Your Personality Type Can Help You in an Interview How Knowing Your Personality Type Can Help You in an Interview 4As a job seeker, no matter your industry, you’re up against a lot of competition. Even the best and the brightest have to find new ways to stand out and make an impression with recruiters and hiring managers. One way to get an edge is to leverage the insights that you can gain about your personality type and working style using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator  (MBTI) and other personality testing instruments. What does taking a personality test have to do with acing an interview? The answer is that self-knowledge can be the key to a top interview performance. Myers-Briggs provides you with critical details about your personal and professional preferences, and how you’re likely to respond in certain situations, both on the job and off. By taking the time to determine your personality type and then understand it, you can in effect give yourself a secret weapon to outshine the competition when trying to land a position. Here are steps that you can use as a job seeker to get to the bottom of your personality type. Armed with this information, you can use the tips below to then leverage that information to improve your performance in job interviews. Taking the Test Myers-Briggs is among the most popular (if not the  most popular) personality testing tools available. The assessment helps identify how you prefer to do things in four key areas: directing and receiving energy, taking in information, making decisions, and approaching the outside world. Having this information about your personality and preferences can help guide both your career path and your approach to interviews, since by knowing yourself well, you’ll be better positioned to answer questions from the hiring team about how you might approach specific workplace situations. If you’re ready to find out what your personality type is, there are several ways to take the MBTI. You can take it online through the official MBTI Online  site for $49.95 (plus tax where applicable). When you take the test this way, you’ll also receive a personalized report that helps describe your exact personality type, as well as tools and resources to help you better understand your type. Alternatively, there are also certified professionals who can administer the MBTI to you, in which case the cost will vary depending on which practitioner you choose. And though can’t vouch for the sites on this list, the BetterHelp website provides a list of places where you can take variations of the Myers Briggs test for free. Filtering the Findings Once you have your results, you’ll find that your personality type is based on four dichotomies that were identified by Carl Jung: Introversion/extroversion:  whether you tend to view the world through more of an internal (introversion) or external (extroversion) lens Sensing/intuition:  whether you gather data using more of your external senses (sensing) or inner sources (intuition) Thinking/feeling:  whether you base your decisions on information that’s objective (thinking) or subjective (feeling) Judging/perceiving:  whether you look at the world through a lens of organization and planning (judging) or prefer to keep it more flexible (perceiving) Based on where you fall in each of these areas, you will be designated with one of 16 personality types, which you can see on this type table. Applying the Insights Once you know your Myers-Briggs type, you’ll be ready to use this information to understand how you tend to operate on the job, and you can draw on that information when preparing how you’ll respond to various interview questions. In a nutshell, the way to do this is to compare what you’ve learned about your personality type with what you know about the requirements for the job that you want. Then find ways to emphasize and align the strengths of your personality type with the needs and preferences of the hiring manager as expressed through the job description. For example, let’s say that your personality type includes “thinking,” and the position for which you’re interviewing is very strategic and requires high-level decision-making. You can thus leverage insights about the “thinking” part of your personality type to emphasize your ability to conduct analyses and think logically to arrive at the absolute best solution.