Are You in Good Company?
Is it really possible to find the ideal job for your personality and skill set? It is, according to Good.co. The site asks questions to evaluate both your personality type, as well as your company's or that of a target company. With the data you can determine what sort of environment you'd thrive in.
Ready to dive in?
Learning More About Yourself
Once you create a profile, you're asked a series of 15 questions, where you choose a spot on a sliding scale, based on your responses. At the end, you're ranked as one or more of the following archetypes that identify your social style, work style and traits:
--Advocate
--Dreamer
--Caretaker
--Straight Shooter
--Socialite
--Go-getter
--Humanitarian
--Idealist
--Inventor
--Mastermind
--Maverick
--Protector
--Rock
--Strategist
--Technician
You may end up being several of those traits, depending on your answers. Good.co gives you the good, the bad and the ugly for your archetypes and explains how you interact with the other archetypes.
Where You Stand With Your Company
Once you get your archetype results, you can read more about how that type does at work, and how it interacts with other types. Then you can see if you're a good fit for your company.
Start by tying in your LinkedIn profile and seeing how you fit in with your role, both present and past. It can show you surprising results.
Right now, Good.co is in beta, with more than 400 companies profiled and growing. If your company has a profile on the site, you can also test yourself for your company, and see how compatible you are. You can also see how you rank compared to your co-workers and peers.
The questions are what's fun. Rather than the boring ones about how you handle stress, they're phrased more like this:
Re-arrange the car brands in order of which brand you think best represents your workplace (or you can think of it as the company car your boss would prefer to have!)
Don't let the fun behind the questions let you think there isn't any science behind it. The site uses a proprietary psychometric algorithm to assess your potential as an employee.
And while traditional psychometric evaluations up until now have been lengthy, time consuming and repetitive lists of 200 or more questions, Good.co boils it down to just 15 on what makes you happy, what's important to you, what motivates you and what helps you succeed at work.
Is This The Future?
While you may use this tool for nothing more than amusement, it might just be where we're headed. Hiring the wrong person or joining the wrong company is an expensive process. "The risk of hiring someone who's not a good fit can cost a company $50K on average," says Samar Birwadker, CEO and co-founder of Good.co. "At the same time, millennials are changing the workforce, and coming in in droves. This category of workers is putting extensive importance on the cultural fit and meaningfulness of their jobs." Vetting for a cultural fit beforehand could make happier employees, happier managers and reduce that costly turnover.
If you want to explore Good.co, On Careers readers can sign up using a this special code: goodcoocr.
Lindsay Olson is a founding partner and public relations recruiter with Paradigm Staffing and Hoojobs.com, a niche job board for public relations, communications, and social media jobs. She blogs at LindsayOlson.com, where she discusses recruiting and job search issues.
