Beyond Words: Enhancing Candidate Experience with Image-Based Personality Questionnaires

Since the mid 20th century, Personality Questionnaires (PQs) have been an essential tool for recruitment and talent management, helping employers understand candidates’ work styles, and cultural fit. ?

At their inception, PQs were simple self-report inventories designed to measure basic traits. Over time, advancements in psychology and psychometrics led to the development of more sophisticated tools. At this stage, questionnaires incorporated rigorous statistical methods and theoretical frameworks to provide more accurate and comprehensive assessments. They were also, crucially, quite long. ?

In recruitment and talent acquisition, shorter versions of traditional PQs are now widely used to gain deeper insights into candidates beyond their CVs and interviews. These assessments, which maintain the same validity and reliability as their longer predecessors, help employers understand a candidate’s personality and likely fit with the organisation. However, despite being shorter and more focused, today’s candidates have changing expectations of the assessment experience. How do we meet these expectations? ?

The Next Generation of PQs: Image-Based Assessments?

Using visual stimuli in personality assessments makes the process of measuring personality more engaging while still delivering meaningful insights. Image-based PQs, where candidates respond to visual prompts rather than text, tap into this need for a more dynamic and immersive experience. ?

At the heart of image-based PQs is the concept that visuals can evoke more instinctive, emotional responses than text-based questions. Instead of prompting candidates to think critically about how they might behave in a given situation, images allow them to react quickly and intuitively. ?

For example, presenting candidates with a set of images depicting different workplace settings—ranging from busy, open-plan offices to tranquil, remote working environments—can provide immediate insight into where a candidate feels most comfortable. The power of image-based assessments lies in their ability to bypass cognitive biases that often arise in text-based questionnaires, where candidates may overthink or select what they perceive to be the ‘right’ answer.?

Additionally, visuals offer the potential to engage candidates more deeply in the assessment process. Image-based PQs can reduce the fatigue that comes with repetitive, text-heavy questions, keeping candidates more involved and potentially improving the quality of their responses.?

Furthermore, research corroborates the effectiveness of image-based personality assessments and demonstrates strong convergent validity with established personality models, such as the Big Five.?

Whether image or text-based, all psychometric assessments should be scrutinised through the pillars of reliability, validity, and fairness. ?

Enhancing Candidate Experience?

If rigorously designed and tested, image-based PQs can introduce compelling benefits, particularly when it comes to enhancing candidate engagement. For candidates, the experience of responding to images feels more natural and intuitive than navigating long-winded text-based questions. It also aligns with the way today’s candidates consume information—visually and interactively. This makes the process feel less like a test and more like a dynamic, immersive experience.?

Image-based assessments are also usually quicker to complete than traditional text-based questionnaires because they prompt more instinctive responses. Instead of relying on lengthy self-reflection, candidates react quickly to images, making the overall process more efficient. This reduces cognitive load, resulting in a smoother and more engaging experience.?

Additionally, if properly adjusted to minimise cultural bias, incorporating culturally appropriate images that reflect diverse experiences and avoid stereotypes can promote inclusivity and reduce biases in image-based assessments. These images help transcend language barriers, offering a more universal interpretation compared to words, which may have different connotations across cultures. The combination of images and brief text reduces reliance on language skills, making the assessment process more accessible to candidates with varying levels of language proficiency. This dual-format approach reduces cognitive load, creating a more inclusive and user-friendly experience, and fostering diversity by ensuring the assessment process is fair and equitable for people from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.??

Finally, by virtue of being less text-heavy, image-based PQs can easily be completed on mobile devices and do not require candidates to own a laptop. This makes them even more accessible and helps expand the potential candidate pool. ?

The Future of Personality Questionnaires?

As with talent assessment more broadly, candidate experience is at the forefront of personality questionnaire design, with a shift towards more engaging, interactive formats that resonate with today’s candidates. Image-based PQs are at the forefront of this shift, offering a reliable way to create more immersive assessment experiences. However, as we have reiterated time and again, none of this should be at the detriment of good science. Whether image or text-based, all psychometric assessments should be scrutinised through the pillars of reliability, validity, and fairness. ?

What to expect from the upcoming Sova image-based PQ?

Image-based PQs are a great tool for employers to make their hiring process more engaging and accessible, without having to compromise on the accuracy of assessment results. ?

As such, we are pleased to introduce Sova’s upcoming image-based Personality Questionnaire, coming soon in 2024. Founded upon Sova's well-validated model of personality, the assessment offers a range of readily available reports but can also be easily mapped to client competency models for a more tailored approach.?

This new format cuts the completion time in half, offering a quicker and smoother experience without compromising on the science. With a mobile-first design, candidates can complete the assessment wherever and whenever suits them. ?

But what truly makes our new image-based PQ stand out is the focus on candidate experience. ?Candidates engage with visual and text-based prompts in an intuitive, interactive interface that keeps them engaged throughout the process. By simplifying the assessment, we have created a more user-friendly experience that reduces dropout rates and makes the process fairer and more enjoyable. Stay tuned for more updates. ???

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