Would you hire an INTJ-A?

| Lisa Waldera

Lisa Waldera (25) is a master’s student Communication Studies from Bremen, Germany. For three years now, she’s been living on campus. Next to her study, she regularly visits the cinema and enjoys concerts of all music genres. Every other week she writes about her life at the University of Twente.

Photo by: Annabel Jeuring

I participated in one of the workshops organized by the Business Days Twente. Applications for non-technical students. Almost finishing my master thesis, I felt like I could use every help possible with my upcoming job applications. One of the possibilities to make my CV more interesting for recruiters was to add a personal story or touch. For example, include a personality test result. I had done several personality tests in the second year of Psychology Bachelor. One of them was the 16 Personalities that gives you a letter combination describing your personality as a result. But I did not remember the exact combination of mine. I went to the file with the working material of that module. Work field orientation. Lo and behold, there it was. The portfolio that included the result of my personality tests. Personality traits are very stable throughout one’s life. The results from two years ago should still count today. According to the 16 Personalities test, I am the Architect with the letter combination INTJ-A. This stands for confident individualism. Introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging and assertive.

However, I have learned during that module that these test results are informative but not necessarily meaningful. They are too black and white. All five traits are measured on a continuum with one trait on each side. Only adding the percentage is showing how far I am leaning toward a personality trait. I am considered 63% introverted, as opposed to 37% extraverted. And I can confirm that I am indeed an introverted person. Social situations are draining my energy while I recharge by focusing on my internal thoughts and feelings. This should not be confused with always being shy and socially anxious. Some introverts are like that, others not. Extraverted people always gain energy from social situations and external stimulation. Being alone is draining for them. Not very helpful during an ongoing lockdown. But most people cannot be exclusively sorted into one of the two extremes. For example, my traits thinking and judging are barely above the 50%. They are barely leaning toward one side of the scale. My letter combination itself does not include this information at all.

Adding the given five-letter combination INTJ-A to my CV would not immediately indicate how far on the continuum of each trait I stand. Almost everyone shows characteristics of both opposing traits but with different manifestations. A recruiter cannot expect all INTJ-As to be the same. On the other hand, I do not expect a professional recruiter to really judge my personality based on a simple letter combination. Maybe it would be more descriptive in this case to name the famous people with same personality type instead. Who could possibly decline my application if it states that I have the same traits as Michelle Obama, Katniss Everdeen, Gandalf the Grey or Arnold Schwarzenegger?

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