JFP Library 01

Your Job Fit Profile Report will give you an objective, scientific measurement of your workplace strengths and restraints, based on your individual behavioral traits. Use this report in job interviews and meetings with your manager to position yourself for success.

Employers want to know what you do, not what you think.
by John Loven

I recently discussed Job Fit Profiles with a woman - the president of a service club - who was interested in how MRA (Management Research Associates) profiling works and how it could help her contemplate a career change. She completed the Job Fit Profile (JFP), the proprietary MRA tool for measuring and describing behavioral traits. For those who are new to JFP, The assessment asks you to look at a list of 100 descriptive words and select all the words that other people have used to describe you. You are then presented with the same list of words and asked to select those which are truly descriptive of you.

After completing the assessment the lady send me a note:

"Interesting choice of descriptive words. I found that the words I chose for myself are those I feel best describe what I feel, not what I try to appear to be and work to be. As I say, 'what you see is pure sham...many times.' How did you put what I 'work against within myself to be an effective person� in a descriptive list of words?

Like many people, she had become interested in her inner process of selecting words, and wondered how we could possibly anticipate the complexity of such a personal process. I wrote to her saying, "We don't know what you were thinking and we don't care." I was only flippant because I know her well, but I went on to explain the origin of the Job Fit Profile assessment. Knowing the origins of the process will give you added confidence when using the report in a job interview.

How the Assessment was Developed

Several hundred people from many walks of like were recruited as test subjects by MRA. They engaged in a series of activities with each other while they were observed by trained researchers. The observers knew all the details of the four behavioral traits which the assessment measures:

Ascendancy (A): Assertive response to challenge
Sociability (S): Introversion/extroversion
Emotional Accommodation (E): Emotional response to the environment - active/calm, variety/stability
Readjustment (R): Degree of adaptive behavior to authority and structured situations

The observers were trained to recognize how these traits play out in interpersonal behaviors. The subjects were ranked high or low on the four traits based on observed interactions with others.

After lengthy observation, the subjects were then asked to choose, from a list of about 200 descriptive terms, words that others had used to describe them and words that they felt were accurate descriptors. The results were subjected to detailed statistical analysis to determine which words "cluster around" the individuals who are high and low on the four traits. Words that didn't cluster were excluded. When two words had almost exactly the same clustering tendency, one was removed to reduce redundancy. The result is our list of 100 words and a scoring method that measures the strength of the four behavioral traits.

The Inner Process

I have described the research process to make the point that the Assessment says nothing about anybody's inner processes. We don't even speculate on what makes people choose certain words - we don't have any data about that. In a sense, we don't even want any data about that. What we have is a very strong set of statistical associations: people with certain traits do choose certain words. The Job Fit Profile produces results that are acknowledged to be very accurate more than 90% of the time.

Over years of profiling, I�ve heard many different accounts of what went on in the subjects� minds. Some, like the lady who wrote to me, took a careful and analytical approach, carefully observing and categorizing their own word selection process. On the other hand, lots of people tell me it's no different than being asked to name the colors of their living room furniture: It's just an exercise in memory. For yet others, it's an existential exercise in "who am I supposed to be?"

The bottom line is that, for all the varying accounts of the inner process, the accuracy remains very high. In most of my experience, when the Job Fit Profile is not accurate, the subject was under extreme stress or was not doing the exercise honestly.

The Power of Statistical Association

Here are a couple examples of strong statistical association - scientifically sound and well regarded - without any identified "inner process":

Numerous studies covering 140 years have shown that married persons tend to have better general health and, in fact, live longer than their unmarried counterparts. To this day, no one has definitively explained the mechanism behind this phenomenon, but it is established fact.
A recent study of diet and drinking patterns published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reveals that people who drink wine tend to choose foods that are healthier for the heart. No one has put forward a reason for this, but it is considered a possible explanation for the strong association between moderate wine drinking and better cardiac health.

The excellent accuracy of the Job Fit Profile is another example of a strong statistical association: people who are high or low on the four behavioral traits choose certain words far more often than others. The resulting system is predictive and stands up to statistical rigor, but without making any assertions about the subjects� inner process of word selection.

We don't care what you think, and that's good!

-John Loven
Questions or Comments? Let Me Know.