How Knowing Your Personality Type Can Help You in an Interview

How Knowing Your Personality Type Can Help You in an InterviewHow Knowing Your Personality Type Can Help You in an Interview4As a job seeker, no matter your industry, youre 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 font 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 youre likely to respond in certain situations, both on the job and off. By taking the time to determine your personality font and then understand it, you can in effect give yourself a secret weapon to outs hine 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 TestMyers-Briggs is among the most popular (if not themost 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, youll be better positioned to answer questions from the hiring team about how you might approach specific workplace situations.If youre 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 Onlinesite for $49.95 (plus tax where applicable). When you take the test this way, youll 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 cant 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 FindingsOnce you have your results, youll find that your personality type is based on four dichotomies that were identified by Carl jung und schnIntroversion/extroversionwhether you tend to view the world through more of an internal (introversion) or external (extroversion) lensSensing/intuitionwhether you gather data using more of your external senses (sensing) or inner sources (intuition)Thinking/feelingwhether you base your decisions on information thats objective (thinking) or subjective (feeling)Judging/perceivingwhether 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 InsightsOnce you know your Myers-Briggs type, youll 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 youll respond to various interview questions. In a nutshell, the way to do this is to compare what youve 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 descripti on.For example, lets say that your personality type includes thinking, and the position for which youre 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.