If you’re applying for a supervisory or management-level position, you may be asked to take one of the Hogan tests online. These personality exams are designed to assess your capacity for leadership and ability to cooperate with others in a team environment.
Preparing for the questions ahead of time will help you to present a more accurate profile to prospective employers. Becoming familiar with the type of questions you’ll encounter and the rating scale that will be used to evaluate your responses will allow you to put your best foot forward during the interview process.
What Is a Hogan Assessment?
Dr. Joyce and Robert Hogan believed that personality, above all else, determined someone’s success both personally and professionally. The character traits that people build and refine throughout their lifetimes will help them either to become competent, honest leaders or corrupt, arrogant tyrants.
Ambition, stress management, and sociability, among other traits, are excellent indications of future performance. Though you can teach someone a set of skills, you cannot teach him to be a good leader.
By assessing your strengths, weaknesses, potential, motivating factors, and core values, the Hogan exams allow employers to generally measure your capacity for success in the workplace.
During the exam, you’ll be presented with a series of seemingly irrelevant questions designed to evaluate your readiness to cooperate, your potential for growth, and your reactions to stress.
Believe it or not, companies care about your values. Hiring the wrong people could cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, either in low productivity costs or because of poor customer service. Worse still, bad employees will affect the company culture as a whole affecting their colleagues in a negative way.
By assessing your personality, your prospective employer is checking to make sure that your attitude will contribute to their initiatives in a positive way.
Who Needs to Take a Hogan Personality Assessment?
There are several different kinds of Hogan personality tests, and each of them is designed to identify certain qualities. That being said, the Hogan personality tests are primarily designed for upper-level management and supervisory positions or at least posts for candidates who will eventually rise up through the ranks. Think CEO’s, accountants, managers, consultants, and specialists.
The reason for this is fairly straightforward. The higher someone rises within the company, the more influence they have within it. At lower tiers, hiring decisions are still significant. However, a CEO’s personality has an enormous impact on the company’s bottom line. If he’s stubborn, neurotic, or overly aggressive, he could single handedly cause the company to go bankrupt just because of poor leadership.
Types of Hogan Assessments:
There are four kinds of online Hogan assessment tests, all of which are designed uniquely to identify potential in different areas. Below, you’ll find a description of each of the four Hogan tests.
Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI)
The Hogan Personality Inventory is based on the Five-Factor Model of Personality, and it’s supposed to measure what Hogan called the bright side of personality. The bright side of personality refers to the qualities that define you when you’re at your best. These characteristics will help you succeed and eventually climb the ranks through the company.
The Five-Factor Model, or the Big Five as many like to call it, was developed by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa. The classification system asserts that it’s possible both to qualify an individual’s character and to account for the enormous variety in human personalities by using five general categories to group various traits. These, namely, are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, normally abbreviated as O.C.E.A.N.
Hogan Development Survey (HDS)
The Hogan Development Survey measures the dark side of personality. This side of personality comes out during times of stress or fatigue when inhibitions have been lowered. The exam is designed to assess the risk factor associated with new employees.
This assessment generally concerns candidates for higher-level managerial positions. The dark side of our personalities often comes out when we’re dealing with subordinates be they dogs, children, or employees. Many of the qualities found on the dark side of personality are, ironically, the same characteristics found on the bright side of personality only exaggerated. For instance, ambition is crucial to success, but in excess, ambition can derail someone’s career.
Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory (HBRI)
The Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory is a psychometric assessment designed for anyone working in the field of business. The HBRI is administered to graduates and senior officials alike because it does an excellent job of predicting of real-world performance.
On the HBRI, you’ll be asked to analyse data, evaluate numerical reports, and read graphs and diagrams. The company’s goal, in administering this aptitude screening test, is to evaluate your problem-solving skills. In the world of business, professionals are constantly making important decisions, and your prospective employer wants to know that you can make rational choices for them based on the information given to you.
Hogan Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI)
The Hogan Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory assessment gives job seekers the chance to show employers their worth in a rather unique way. At Hogan, they believe that strong, clearly defined values help determine the success not only of an individual, but even of a company as a whole.
This pre-employment psychometrics exam takes between 15 and 20 minutes and evaluates candidates based on ten different values. These include recognition, hedonism, affiliation, security, aesthetics, power, altruism, tradition, commerce, and science. The MVPI aptitude test ultimately helps companies to decide whether a specific applicant will fit into the company culture and support its goals.
Hogan Assessment Tips:
Wondering how to pass a Hogan assessment? When taking these personality tests, there are a few things you should keep in mind.
1. Don’t Always Choose the Neutral Answer
In many cases, you’ll be asked to rate yourself on a numbered scale according to a certain value. For instance, you might see the statement: “It’s important to me that I receive praise for work well done,” and the question will ask you whether you agree or disagree and to what degree. Many test-takers mistakenly assume that they should choose the neutral answer because they don’t want to come off as too proud nor too modest, or in this case, either too insecure or arrogant. However, when you choose the neutral answer too often, you inadvertently come off as indecisive at best and apathetic at worst.
2. Don’t Always Choose the Extreme Answer
On the other hand, you don’t want to choose too many extreme answers either. If you’re always choosing “Strongly Agree” or “Strongly Disagree,” you may receive very high or low scores for certain personality traits. Both very high and low scores are usually unsettling for hiring managers. After all, remember that even if perseverance, for example, is a positive quality, it can quickly become a detrimental to your success if not kept in check. If you work to the point where your either sacrificing your well-being or the company’s best interest just because you want to see a project to completion, you’re not doing anyone any favours.
3. Don’t Feel Ashamed of Your Flaws
The hiring manager knows that you’re flawed. You don’t have to pretend that you’re perfect. That being said, a Hogan personality exam is not the place for you to work on improving yourself. These assessments are designed to test your emotional intelligence. That is to say that they want to know whether you know how you should act. If you don’t always act in accordance with your own values, then that’s okay. Everyone makes mistakes once in a while. On the other hand, if in most situations, you don’t know what you should be doing, there’s cause for concern.
Hogan Test Prep:
Many job seekers assume, unfortunately, that there are no right answers on personality assessments. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Personality assessments are not free questionnaires. They can be scored objectively, and you can deliberately improve your score with a bit of careful preparation.
Very simply, the more practice you do, the better chance you have. Because personality tests are not all that common, most people haven’t had that much experience with them. In completing sets of practice Hogan assessment questions, you’ll start to become familiar with the format of the test and begin to better understand the material.
As you make your way through the Hogan assessment sample questions, take the time to identify which value is being discussed. The better you understand the questions, the more precise you can be in your answers.
When you finish the test, go back through each of the Hogan questions and answers carefully to see whether you can be more consistent. Your free score report will show you your results for each personality trait so that you’ll know exactly where you need to improve if you want to fall within the ideal score range. While you won’t be able to compare your answers to an official answer key, you will be able to analyse whether or not you portrayed yourself accurately through your responses.
Companies That Use Hogan Tests
These few companies that use Hogan assessment tests:
Last Thoughts on the Hogan Assessment System:
Many leading companies around the world have chosen to adopt Hogan’s online psychometric screening tests as a way to improve their hiring system. With decades of experience, Hogan’s psychologists have compiled assessments designed specifically to help businesses identify promising candidates that are not only competent, but also trustworthy.
That being said, not all Hogan leadership assessments are necessarily all that straightforward for anyone who isn’t familiar with them. Take the time to prepare properly before leaving for the assessment centre so you can make sure that you communicate your value to the company as clearly as possible.
