PULSIONS vs. personality tests: what complementarities?

In addition to the usual CVs and cover letters, recruiters and HR managers need as much information about a candidate as possible to eliminate the risk of error. While personality tests help to understand a person’s character type and motivations, the PULSIONS method focuses on the behaviour of an individual in a specific context.

Founder of PULSIONS, Daniel Schmid keeps repeating: his tool is NOT a personality test: it serves to identify the behaviour of an individual in a given context. But can it be complementary to all those questionnaires that recruiters are so fond of in order to identify the character traits of a future talent? In addition to the usual CVs and cover letters, recruiters need as much information as possible to avoid the risk of error and thus avoid penalising and costly turnover within the company.

“The MBTI, for example, will tell you whether that person is an analyst, a diplomat, a sentinel or an explorer. PULSIONS will tell you how a person works, interacts and communicates. Knowing what emanates from a person’s personality AND how they behave in practice provides very complete information.”

A personality test is a series of questions – open, closed, free or multiple-choice – whose answers are associated with a particular characteristic and make it possible to determine the candidate’s soft skills. There is only one condition: the degree of honesty during the exercise. The data from a personality test must therefore be analysed with a certain amount of distance. It may even seem complicated to draw up an accurate psychological profile at the first meeting.

A personality test will hardly stand alone, especially if a company is looking to fill a management position or build a team. How can you be sure that a candidate will have the right attitude during a period of stress? How will he or she react when faced with a crisis? Will he or she be at ease in dealing with customers? A personality test does not answer all these questions. PULSIONS does.

“In my opinion, the limit of a personality test is to categorise a person by saying and affirming that he or she IS like this or like that, and then those around him or her behave according to this filter alone”, explains Daniel Schmid, “This freezes the positions and the evaluation of people. With PULSIONS, we say what a person DOES naturally, knowing that he or she is also capable of adapting to the different situations he or she has to deal with and that his or her modus operandi can and will evolve as he or she gains experience throughout his or her life and professional career.”

Nevertheless, the founder of PULSIONS does not claim that his method should or can replace all other professional tools. “Recruiting a person requires identifying his or her level of knowledge, skills and experience, so as to validate that he or she has the required level for the position to be filled. It also depends on the chemistry between the person and their colleagues. Our behavioural test, on the other hand, indicates precisely whether his or her modus operandi will be in line with that expected by the company, the contexts he or she will encounter, the challenges of the position in question… And whether his or her way of behaving will work with his or her colleagues or customers.”

In this respect, PULSIONS is complementary to personality tests and to all the tools that recruiters and HR managers use during an interview. “PULSIONS is as reliable as many personality tests”, concludes Daniel Schmid, “The question is what to do with the results. If you put the report in a drawer, it’s not useful! On the other hand, it becomes profitable if the company knows how to use it concretely to enable the person to develop and be effective in his or her function. The advantage of PULSIONS is that it is very concrete, making a direct link with the responsibilities and activities that will be entrusted to the candidate, while taking into account the situation in which the company, the department and the position that the person occupies are located.“