Ex-SHL team launches a series of free assessments

A sophisticated, industry-standard personality questionnaire is being offered entirely free of charge to organisations and individuals, for life, in a move which promises to send shockwaves through the assessment industry.

Developed by ex-SHL (Saville & Holdsworth) test developers, the questionnaire is the first in a new portfolio of free online tests from assessment provider FindingPotential. The company is developing other free online assessments including a values/motivation questionnaire, a 360 degree feedback process, sifting questionnaires for different job types and verbal and numerical reasoning tests. All of these resources will be produced to the same exacting standards as those sold at a premium price by the leading providers but they will be available free of charge.

The FindingPotential personality questionnaire has been created to help organisations enhance their recruitment and people development activities. It can also be used by individuals who want to understand their strengths or change their career.

Assessment testing helps organisations to find people who are genuinely right for the role - those who are likely to enjoy their work and perform well - and it also helps individuals to get jobs that play to their strengths, said Ron Eldridge, Managing Director of FindingPotential. Our new personality questionnaire is a breath of fresh air for the market. Instead of spending around 100million a year on assessment testing, UK organisations can now get the same service entirely free.

Designed to be easy to use, with a contemporary 'look and feel', the FindingPotential personality questionnaire takes around 15 minutes to complete. Based on the industry-standard 'Big Five' personality model, the questionnaire assesses five traits: extraversion; openness to experience; agreeableness; conscientiousness and emotional resilience. A paper-based version of the questionnaire is also available at no charge.

By giving you a real insight into your attitudes, capabilities, behaviour and personality preferences, this questionnaire will help you to understand more about yourself and how you can achieve your personal goals, said Ron Eldridge. Organisations will find it a psychologically-robust and viable alternative to what they're currently using. There's no catch. There are no licence fees, no usage limits and no time limits. You can have unlimited free usage forever.

Individual users receive a clear and easily understood, 15-page report, containing a detailed interpretation of their results, as well as their team role and work preferences and suitable jobs, which they can print and save as a PDF. The reports are generated using expert functionality which means that no specific training is required to interpret the results. However, FindingPotential has developed free worksheets to help individuals to act on the results, as well as career guidance and support workbooks for school leavers, graduates and existing employees.

For organisations, FindingPotential has built a candidate manager platform to host its online assessments. This allows organisations to freely create and customise their own candidate management portals. They can manage their own users, receive personalised reports on their candidates and add their logo onto each questionnaire and report, all completely free.

Experienced users of personality questionnaires, who are happy with their current provider, can use FindingPotential's free service to test out the benefits of personality profiling in areas where budget constraints may have prevented the wider use of testing. Such areas include onboarding, talent identification, self-directed development, leadership development, coaching, team building and conflict resolution.

The new personality questionnaire can also be used by recruitment consultancies, job boards, training providers, consultants and vendors of Applicant Tracking Systems and talent management systems.

Based in Surbiton, Surrey, FindingPotential is a division of TalentDrain, which has been a leading provider of employee engagement surveys and exit questionnaires since 2003.

Our aim is to help organisations save money on assessments so that they'll spend more on retaining and engaging their staff, said Ron Eldridge. People either say we're crazy to be giving away our assessments or they're sceptical about the quality of the products because they're free. Take a look at our offering and you'll see we're providing great resources. When Google gives away free software, no one questions their sanity.

FindingPotential will launch its new portfolio of assessments in the United States, Canada and Australia in 2010. International language versions of the resources will be available by 2011.

The FindingPotential personality questionnaire is freely available at: