The interview went beautifully. Your references were enthusiastic and you wowed your prospective boss. You’re ready to say adieu to your current job and your soon-to-be-former colleagues.

But before you get an official offer for the new position, you’re asked to complete something called a Caliper Profile. It’s an eight-page booklet full of statements clustered in groups of four. You’re instructed to select two in each group: one that best reflects your viewpoint and one that least represents it. Here’s the first group:

Sometimes it’s better to lose than to risk hurting someone. I’m generally good at making “small talk.” Established practices and/or standards should always be followed. I sometimes lose control of my workday.

What’s the “right” answer? What are they looking for? What does small talk have to do with this job anyway?

If you’re asked to take a personality test like this—and millions of people, from short-order cooks to chief financial officers, are—your potential employer wants to know more about you than your résumé and references will ever tell. Personality tests are carefully constructed to reveal the kinds of things that many people don’t want to reveal or don’t even know about themselves: their level of self-confidence, their enthusiasm for teamwork, the depth of their competitiveness and creativity, and their willingness to break or follow rules.

Experience and ability may get a promising candidate in the door, but it’s the intangible personality traits that often play a vital role in who gets the corner office and who’s eventually shown the door. “The world is filled with people who have the degrees but don’t necessarily have the mindset to succeed,” says Steven T. Hunt, chief scientist for Unicru Inc., which has assessed more than 25 million job applicants in the past seven years.

Testing…1, 2, 3

People may exaggerate their experience or pull one over on an interviewer, but they can’t easily fool a carefully constructed questionnaire, personality testing advocates say.

Herb Greenberg, founder and CEO of Caliper Inc., says his Princeton, N.J.-based testing business has been growing 20 percent a year despite—or perhaps because of—the recent recession. Personality testing saves companies money by helping employers determine whether potential hires will mesh with the company culture before they receive costly, time-consuming training. The tests also can help strengthen current employees by pinpointing weaknesses and bolstering strengths.

Some employers may administer a personality test to the finalists for a high-level executive position. At the other end of the spectrum, Unicru helps companies such as Blockbuster and Lowe’s fill tens of thousands of entry-level jobs each year, assessing as many as 40,000 prospective employees each day for reliability and honesty.

Questions and Answers

Evaluating job applicants based on personality isn’t new. The earliest personality tests debuted about 80 years ago to assess military recruits. Today, employers can choose from thousands of tests, which cost between $5 and $5,000 per test, depending on the complexity and specificity of the measurement device, whether the test is administered online or in person, and how detailed the evaluation and follow-up are. Test-takers can spend anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours scratching their heads over the questions.

The most widely used tests are designed and interpreted by industrial psychologists, who build in safeguards to ensure accuracy and reliability. That’s why test-takers will see different versions of the same question throughout the test. If they give consistently inconsistent answers, they’re either trying to defeat the test or they don’t have a shred of self-awareness. In either case, the results will speak for themselves.

Testing experts say it’s best to approach a personality test with honesty and curiosity about yourself. “Don’t try to figure out what they’re measuring,” says Thomas M. Hamilton, president of SelectionResources.com, a Des Moines, Iowa-based testing company. “Figure out who you are. Go in with an attitude of, ‘I’m going to tell them exactly who I am because if I don’t fit the model, fine, I won’t be a good fit [for the job].’”

And remember that while the results of a personality test cannot be used to exclude a potential hire, a candidate who refuses to take a test doesn’t have to be offered a job.

The Keys to Good Testing

Industrial psychologists design personality tests or recommend which one an employer should use by consulting with company officials and human resources personnel to ferret out the traits most valued by the company and most critical for job success.

For example, “companies sometimes make the mistake of saying, ‘We need smart people here,’ but there are different kinds of intelligence,” says Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and president of Dattner Consulting in New York, which tests job applicants for its clients. The proper employment assessment can help test for exactly the right kind.

And sometimes, it’s best to administer personality tests to your top performers and see if your candidates’ results match up. For example, a group of top real estate agents should all score similarly on a test that measures traits such as motivation and attention to detail. A job applicant whose scores fall in line with high performers probably has what it takes.

But, Unicru’s Hunt cautions, “tests don’t predict results directly. They predict behavior associated with results.” So use the test as only one criterion when making hiring decisions.

As a former employee of a personality testing company, Bridget Herd of Minneapolis knew what to expect when she was given an hour-long test as part of the hiring process for a new job. The results accurately depicted her as an open and assertive person, ideal characteristics for the director of strategic marketing at a communications company.

Herd was surprised, however, that the findings described her as lacking independence. That result also puzzled a company executive who reviewed the results with her. Both agreed that Herd worked capably on her own. Other key personnel who interviewed Herd felt the same way. She was offered the job and took it.

“Tests should never be the sole determining factor for hiring,” Herd says, noting that although they’re usually on target, they can’t replace the perspectives gathered during personal contact.

The Oral Exam

And that takes us back to the tried and (sometimes) true interview. With the availability, variety and accuracy of tests, employers might be tempted to skip the interview process. But there’s still no substitute for experience and a face-to-face interview, Hamilton says. He advises his clients to give equal weight to a candidate’s work history, job interview and personality test results. After all, motivation and assertiveness are useless if the applicant lacks the experience or skills to do the job.

Just what can you learn from the interview? Jim Fatzinger, owner of Effective Solutions Inc., a human resources consulting practice in Winston-Salem, N.C., says a job applicant questioned by a skilled interviewer will reveal nearly everything a potential employer needs to know.

An open-ended question such as “How would you approach this project?” prompts the applicant to divulge her experience with similar work, how she prioritizes tasks, and whether she prefers to work alone or with a team. She’ll even disclose her organizational and communication skills, says Fatzinger, an instructor in human resources for University of Phoenix who trains employers to conduct thorough interviews.

Companies that rely too heavily on tests lose a valuable chance to better understand their employees. “I really like to strengthen an organization rather than make it dependent on external things,” Fatzinger says.

Personality tests are simply tools to help companies make better decisions. Certainly, nothing is foolproof, and no matter how many tools a company has at its disposal, bad hiring decisions can still happen. But using a personality test in addition to—not instead of—the interview and checking with references can increase a company’s chances of getting it right the first time.

So, if you’re asked to take a test for a job, don’t sweat it. It’s one part of the process and probably won’t make or break your chances. In fact, it’s one more chance to show ’em what you’ve got.

Building a Better Team

There are scores of personality tests that won’t help choose the best candidate but can help improve your team once they’re all in place. The popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which pinpoints personality traits affecting interactions, is good for team building and management training.

Myers-Briggs places people into one of 16 categories, each a blend of their preferences for relating to others (introverted or extroverted?), gathering information (sensing it or intuiting it?), making decisions (by thinking or by feeling?) and ordering their life (by judging or by perceiving?).

Knowing that your sociable, warm co-worker is an ENFP (Extroverted Intuition Feeling Perceiving) may help you better understand why she’s so blasé about deadlines: She can get overwhelmed by details, hates schedules and always wants to move on to something new. If you’re an ISTJ (Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging), no wonder you bristle when you’re assigned to work with her. You’re a responsible, serious person who thrives on the predictability of deadlines. These insights can help managers learn how individuals prefer to be motivated, recognized and even reprimanded, and can help them form a project team with a well-balanced mix of types.

The Cowboys, the Raiders and the Wonderlic

Nearly 2.5 million job applicants take the Wonderlic Personnel Test each year. But few have as much riding on the results as the 300 college football players who tackle it each February.

Like everyone else, the athletes have 12 minutes to whip through the 50-question IQ test, calculating math problems and solving logic puzzles. Unlike other job seekers, however, a promising college football player with a high Wonderlic score is an attractive NFL draft pick.

About 80 percent of a player’s overall evaluation is based on physical skills such as passing, running and agility. But if he aspires to call plays and handle the ball, he’d better shine on the intelligence test.

“These teams are investing millions of dollars in their players,” says Michael C. Callans, president of Wonderlic Consulting in Libertyville, Ill. “If you’re going to invest that much, you want to make sure they can think.”

Most people ace 21 out of 50. Pro quarterbacks usually score a 25. Callans recalls only one pro player with a perfect score: Bengals punter Pat McInally, a Harvard alumnus. How well can you do? Try these five questions before the next draft: wonderlic.com.