All good personality assessments have measures to pick up one or more of the following:

Faking or Impression Management

This is where the individual has tried to manipulate the test to “look good” or portray themself more favourably than is true. 

Some test makers recommend getting individuals to resit the assessment if faking is detected.

Other providers recommend information gained from a "faked" assessment is given less weight or no weight in the selection process.

Some organisations go so far as to exclude those who fake the assessments from going further in the recruitment process.

Consistency

Consistency measures picks up if individuals have answered inconsistently compared to others.  Inconsistency can indicate either careless answering or that the individual has tried to manipulate the tool and in doing so became inconsistent in their answering.

Central Tendency

Answering centrally applies to assessments where there is a rating scale. For example a 1-5 rating scale:

1=strongly disagree

2=disagree

3=neutral

4=agree

5=strongly agree

Answering centrally is taking the middle answers and not using the extreme ends of the rating scale (for a 1-5 scale, answering centrally would mean only or mainly using ratings 2, 3 or 4). 

Answering centrally can indicate either than the individual has tried to manipulate the tool so not to show strong preferences, or it can indicate someone who is more conservative and who does not have strong preferences.

Is the Personality Profile Valid?

The three measures above are used by the test makers and interpreters to gauge whether the information provided is valid. 

Most often “faking” occurs when individuals are taking tests for employment, and therefore there is an incentive to try to “look good”.

While you can try to cheat or fake an assessment in an employment process, there are several reasons that we do not recommend you do this.

Reasons Not to Try to Fake an Assessment:

1. You may get caught cheating and this may disadvantage you in your application for the role.  Some organisations even exclude those who “fake” from going further in the employment process.
2. While you may think you know what the organisation is looking for and therefore try to look that way, you may not really know what they are looking for and therefore by manipulating your answers you may end up seeming unsuitable.
3. What are the potential consequences of getting a job on false pretences? 

• Let us consider a scenario, Bob applies for a role and does some testing for it which he manipulates to look a certain way and he then gets the role.  Imagine Bob has shown he is a strong sales person who loves cold calling, in fact he is shy and hates selling, and is quite concerned he will not like cold calling. 
• What happens when Bob is in the role: either he is going to be miserable and will leave after a short period of time, or he will not succeed in the role and he may be performance managed out for not meeting his sales targets. 
• Neither consequence is good for Bob, in fact either may knock his confidence even further.

By revealing your true preferences you are more likely to get a job you will enjoy and be good at, but also by revealing weaknesses, the organisation knows the areas you will need support and development in and therefore if you get the job they can put this support and training in place for you.

No one is perfect, we all have weaknesses, revealing them upfront in the assessments you complete is what is best for you and the organisation considering employing you.