When looking at a PTP, there are a multitude of possible combinations at the attribute level. And the individual combinations can lead to important new insights about candidates’ behavioural patterns, but you’ll never benefit from those insights if you don’t explore them.
A candidate’s score on a particular attribute can mean several things. And those nuances only become clear when you start combining the attributes and analysing them in combination with each other.
For example, let’s say we have a candidate who scores highly for career-oriented. In isolation, it means that the candidate tends to prioritise their working life and aspires to climb the career ladder.
If the analysis results show that the candidate also scores highly for Evaluating Positively, Constructive Attitude, Considerateness & Diplomacy, a perfectly reasonable assumption would be that this candidate believes that personal ambitions are best achieved collaboratively and through cooperation with others.
Conversely, if the candidate has a low score for Evaluating Positively, Constructive Attitude, Considerateness & Diplomacy, it must be assumed that the candidate will be more willing to step on others in order to advance and achieve their goals.
An obvious hypothesis based on the above combinations would be that the first career-oriented candidate would naturally fit well into a role where there is a high degree of collaboration needed to achieve goals, while the second candidate would be better suited to a more autonomous role where it is every man for himself, and the candidate is driven in their pursuit of results by internal competition.
Remember that when you analyse attributes in combination with each other, you form educated hypotheses – not truths. It is therefore important to prove or disprove your hypotheses through dialogue with the candidate during feedback.
Practice makes perfect
Several of our users say they are a bit unsure about how to approach the combination of attributes. How do they know they’re doing it right?
And we’re always here for a chat if there are any doubts, but we don’t have all the answers either. You should always form a qualified hypothesis after careful analysis. And of course, our educated guesses may turn out to be wrong, but you’ll never know if you don’t feel your way forward.
Therefore, it is fundamentally about throwing caution to the wind and plunging into the analysis of new insights using a combination of attributes.
And then, no matter how experienced you are, you should always test your hypotheses against the candidate’s responses during feedback, and thus learn whether the analysis holds true.
