Mastering the Hogan Assessment: Your Ultimate Preparation Guide
In a world where there are many applicants for advertised jobs, an assessment test is one of the tools used by employers to whittle down the list of applicants to those they wish to interview. This makes the hiring process more efficient.
The Hogan Assessment Test is one such tool and is widely used by employers. Having applied for a position, you will likely be asked to take one of their tests. It is essential that you know what the Hogan Assessment is and devote time to adequately prepare for it.
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Why Are Employers Using Personality Tests?
Employers use Hogan because hiring is a tedious process. One wrong decision can affect workplace performance. As such, many institutions use the Hogan Assessment to ensure that the people they will hire or consider are working adults who will work well with existing employees and will be good fit in the company culture.
What Is the Hogan Assessment Test?
The Hogan Assessment Test is a personality assessment tool designed to evaluate an individual’s personality traits and behaviors in work-related settings. The assessment aims to provide insights into an individual’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential for success in various job roles.
Dr. Hogan, along with Dr. Joyce Hogan, founded Hogan Assessments, the company that developed and popularized the Hogan Assessment Tools.
The Hogan Assessment Test is named after Dr. Robert Hogan and Dr. Joyce Hogan, renowned psychologists and a pioneer in the field of personality assessment. Dr. Hogan founded Hogan Assessments, the company that developed and popularized the Hogan Assessment Tools. The research and expertise of Dr. Joyce and Robert Hogan in understanding personality dynamics in the workplace helped in developing Hogan Assessment Tools.
The Hogan Assessment Tools, including the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), Hogan Development Survey (HDS), and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI), have gained popularity due to their reliability, validity, and practical applications in various organizational settings.
The Range of Hogan Assessment Tests Available to Employers
The Hogan Assessment Test comes in a variety of forms and your prospective employer will have chosen the one which best suits his needs. It is used by employers in various industries, a lot of which are featured in the Harvard Business Review and Fortune 500.
Whichever test the employer has opted for there is a test prep pack available from Job Test Prep. Tailored especially for the Hogan tests. The tests are designed to help you ace the test and reach your goal of being called to interview for a job or Hogan Lovells vacation scheme.
Ensuring you use a reputable and reliable test prep pack that puts you in a position to deal comfortably with the Hogan Assessment Tests.
What Do the Various Hogan Assessment Tests Evaluate?
1. The HPI, the Hogan Personality Inventory Test produces an inventory of a candidate’s personality.
2. The HDS, the Hogan Development Survey assesses how well you deal with high-pressure situations.
3. The MVPI, the Motives, Values, and Preferences Inventory test assesses your motivation, the reasons for you being the person you are and shows what values you have.
4. The HBRI, the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory test will tell your prospective employer how good your mental reasoning abilities are. From the information gained from this test, he will know how good you are at reading data and, problem-solving.
5. The Judgment test shows your adaptability, your willingness to learn, and your self-confidence in decision-making. It also lets the employer know openminded you are in dealing with criticism and negative feedback. This test also examines your verbal and numerical reasoning skills.
Want to practice for any of the different exams? Check out the prep pack from Job Test Prep by clicking on the button below.
How Are the Hogan Assessment Tests Results Presented to the Employer?
After the completed tests are evaluated, the results are presented in reports (known as products in the Hogan Assessment Systems), each report focusing on an area that is important in the workplace.
1. Hogan Select
The Hogan Select product helps the employer identify the applicant who is best suited to a role. It saves the employer the time and expense incurred if an unsuitable employee is chosen. From this report, the employer will know the strengths and weaknesses of the applicant and what talent they could bring to the table.
2. Hogan Develop
This report highlights key skills the applicant may not exhibit during a normal interview. It allows the employer to see the extra talent the prospective employee can bring to the company. The test also works in the applicant’s favor in that it highlights hidden talents that might otherwise be missed.
3. Hogan Lead
This report identifies candidates who show good leadership skills. When the employer has a leadership role to fill, the report ensures the person he selects has the required talents.
For the applicant who may not wish to be boastful in an interview situation, this report is especially useful as it allows him to shine.
4. Hogan Safe-System
Employers are increasingly worried about safety in the workplace. They concern themselves with the physical safety of staff and members of the public. Safety concerns also extend to the financial safety of a company. The safe-system report highlights the best people to put in charge of safety issues.
5. Hogan Team
This report helps the employer identify the best person for a particular role. But they also benefit new employees because this ensures that they are placed in a work environment that matches their personality traits and cognitive abilities. In short, this ensures that the candidate is a good fit with the team.
Hogan Tests Are Crucial for Employer and Employee
While it can be daunting to read such a complicated set of tests to complete a hiring process, the Hogan test ensures that the employer will find the right candidate that has the character traits that fit well with the company culture. Since the candidate’s personality matches the company culture and its values, it will most likely lead to good work perfomance and job satisfaction.
When the employee and the organization is a good match, great things will happen.
Going for a Personality Test Can Be Daunting
When job applicants hear the term “personality test,” they tend to be confused. Most of us assume we have a particular personality type that may or may not be liked by the people we meet. We also assume we cannot prepare for a personality test because of being a unique individual.
However, there are a lot of misconceptions there.
We can prepare for the test by using a reliable Hogan Personality Test prep pack. The pre-test pack is recommended to give the best pre-test preparation. It also helps the user overcome his misconceptions about personality tests.
Don’t Confuse Personality and Behavior
It can be tempting to think if you could change your personality for the day of the test then all your difficulties would be over.
But a personality change is not necessary to ace a psychometric test. The test measures your personality in terms of your behavior.
To put this in context consider how you measure a person whom you meet for the first time. Not knowing them, you judge them from the behavior they exhibit.
And there is your answer.
You know you behave in different ways depending on the situation you find yourself in. Consider yourself in a work situation when you are doing a psychometric test. When answering the test questions, answer in a way you would consider suited to the workplace. Remember: your answers reflect future performance.
How Does the Test Measure Personality?
Psychometric tests measure personality by testing how you would behave in certain situations. The evaluator decides on your personality traits from your answer. Based on your answers to the given questions, all the information is gathered and a personality profile is developed.
This is the profile the employer will be examining during the recruitment process.
Sample Questions You Can Expect in the Hogan Assessment
Consider how you would answer the following:
A) Select one of the following statements that best describes you.
1. I am detail-oriented
2. I concentrate too much on doing everything correctly.
3. If I enjoy doing a task, I will include every possible detail
B) Select one statement to describe what you would do in the following situations.
You notice the fire extinguishers in the company’s office block haven’t been serviced in over a year. Would you:
1. Decide it is none of your business?
2. Assume the building manager would notice it at some point?
3. Alert the manager to the danger sub-serviced fire extinguishers could pose?
Your team at work is lacking direction. Would you:
1. Wait for management to appoint a team leader?
2. Make suggestions as to what direction the team should take with a project?
3. Continue with your own work and assume the problem will resolve itself?
Note your answers to these questions. With those answers, assess the profile you are giving of yourself to your potential employer.
For example: If you answered 3) to the first statement you are suggesting you go into detail if you enjoy the task. This raises the question, “What do you do if you don’t enjoy the task?”
In the second statement who would you select for a role in workplace safety, the person who decided it was none of his business? Or the person who alerted the manager to the risk?
In the third statement who do you think is likely to be selected for a leadership role, the person who answers 2) or the person who selects 3)?
The Answers Given Build the Profile
As you can see from the above exercise, the answers given by the applicant tell us how the person is likely to behave in a given situation. Combine the answers given over a series of questions and a fuller picture of the applicant emerges.
Answering these questions without preparation is challenging. These tests are not your typical school tests. Using preparation materials that focus on this type of testing gives you a better opportunity to shine in the personality test.
Preparing for the Test
Use Preparation Materials
Use your Test Prep Pack as an essential tool in your test preparation arsenal. Your test prep pack comes complete with practice tests that will help you prepare for the Hogan Test. Doing exercises is considered by educationalists to be a more effective way of learning than simply reading through sheaves of information. You can also try free online practice tests for extra study materials.
Using a test prep pack and taking a practice test also saves the time that could be wasted searching for sources and information. You know the information you are using is reliable, so you are also cutting down on the need to cross-check facts.
Time Management
Before embarking on any program of test preparation it is essential to plan how you are going to use your time.
A quick overview of your test pack should help you judge how much time is going to go into preparing for the test.
Identify how much time you have available to you and draw up a timetable of when you are going to work on the exercises.
Ideally, preparation should be done in 45–50-minute blocks. Follow these blocks with 10-minute breaks. Regular breaks will mean that your mind is working more efficiently.
Within the allotted time you will need to complete the exercises and review the progress you are making.
At the end of each study session, leave 15 to 20 minutes to revise what you have covered. This will ensure you remember pointers given more easily.
Becoming Familiar with the Test
There are so many things that can jeopardize your performance on a test.
Lack of preparation is the most obvious one. But being unfamiliar with the layout and timing of the test can be avoided by making full use of your test prep pack.
See the sample tests as your guiding blocks for the exam preparation period.
Unpleasant Surprises
Facing a style of questioning you are unfamiliar with can undermine your confidence and you can waste valuable time deciding how to approach answering.
Feeling ill-equipped to deal with a question is another time waster. Taking practice tests reguarly will give you the confidence to work your way steadily through the test.
Running Out of Time
Mis-timing the test can leave you with unanswered questions, questions you could have performed well in.
To avoid these problems using a pre-test pack is essential in your test preparation. Your test pack gives you sample tests allowing you to enter the test center familiar with what lies ahead.
The test pack also gives you advice on passing the test in the allotted time. With this information, you can decide how much time you will take in answering individual questions.
You may also want to budget time to check over your work before the end of the test. Rectifying any mistakes you have made could increase your chances of success.
Using a Reliable Practice Test Is Key
Given that psychometric tests are possibly new to you, it is essential to attempt the sample tests in your test prep pack.
This will:
- Make you familiar with the format
- Allow you to see the progress you are making as you work over a series of tests
- Warn you if you are not making the desired progress and put you in a position to rectify the situation
- Allow you to judge the personality profile you are presenting and compare it to the ideal profile
Pre-test Days
The days before a test that could have a major bearing on your future are difficult. To ensure you enter the test center refreshed, as well as prepared, try the following pointers:
- Aim to finish your preparation by mid-day on the day prior to the test. Attempting to learn new material that day is usually futile
- Make sure you have stocked up on the equipment you need for the test day(s)
- Ensure that test day(s) are free from any agenda other than the test itself
- Remember the old adage, “A healthy mind in a healthy body.” Ensure you are well-rested, getting fresh air and some physical exercise as well as decent nutrition
- Use stress-busting techniques— Yoga, meditation can be helpful, or you may have some techniques of your own
- If possible, avoid any substances that interfere with your thinking abilities
And most importantly, it is tempting to spend long nights in further preparation. Don’t do it. Proper rest can be more beneficial at this point. A test is both physically and mentally draining.
Test Day
Having put in the preparation in the run-up to the test, how you behave on test day is vital if you are to capitalize on your hard work.
Meet the day confident that you have done all that you can do preparation-wise. Your job now is to show that on your answer sheet.
Naturally, you will feel a little nervous. Being a little nervous is good. It enables us to get the best out of ourselves. Being over-confident has been the stumbling block for many.
Conversely being overly nervous can interfere with your performance in the test. If nervousness threatens to sabotage your efforts have some breathing exercises you can fall back on to calm those nerves.
During the Test
Thanks to your work with the test prep pack, you already know the structure and timing of the test. You know how much time you can devote to individual questions. Remember, it is a well-known fact among educators that a candidate’s results depend on how well-organized they are when doing the exam.
But before you begin to answer questions flick through the test quickly. Doing this will ensure there are no unpleasant surprises waiting as you work your way through the questions.
While you are answering questions, remember your answers are going to create a profile of you, the candidate. You already know the profile you need to create. Keep that picture to the forefront of your mind as you select your answers to questions.
When finished and if time allows, check back over your answers. Are you pleased with the profile on the answer sheet?
If not, there may be some twigging and tweaking to do. In planning how you are going to execute the test make sure you build those few moments into how you plan on using the test time.
Catching a minor error at this point can make a difference.
Use Your Time Wisely
Remember time is of the essence. Do not spend longer than you had planned on any one question.
For the same reason do not leave the test center until the time is up. Many people have left test centers presuming they had finished only to get a brainwave when they were on the wrong side of the door.
If Stress Attacks
Stress attacks even the coolest of us and at the most inopportune times. People who have prepared well for examinations, and even those who haven’t, can find their best efforts sabotaged by stress.
Should this happen to you, don’t attempt to fight it. It is impossible to give coherent answers when stressed. Instead, take a few moments to relax and take deep breaths. That should do the trick.
Ignore All Others
Rude as it may seem, test day is not the day to worry about your fellow applicants. If you are nervous, casual chatter before the test will heighten your nervousness. You do not need to hear how late somebody prepared the previous night or their suggestions on how the test should be approached.
Save That Conversation for Later
The same advice applies to the duration of the test. Concentrate on your own answers. There will be people who finish early, give vent to groans at a question or who seem to be working faster than you are.
It is your test, the people judging the test will be judging you based on your answers. That is what you need to focus on for the duration.
Conclusion – And It’s Over
Congratulate yourself. You have undertaken a test different from the types you have sat before. How you performed is now in the hands of the Hogan evaluators. Taking time to relax should be your focus!
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Sarah is an accomplished educator, researcher and author in the field of testing and assessment. She has worked with various educational institutions and organisations to develop innovative evaluation methods and enhance student learning. Sarah has published numerous articles and books on assessment and learning. Her passion for promoting equity and fairness in the education system fuels her commitment to sharing insights and best practices with educators and policymakers around the world.
