Vibe Group Assessment Practice: The Bridge Personality

What Vibe Group uses, and when

Vibe Group is an IT recruitment and staffing company headquartered in Amsterdam. TestGroup publishes a client case naming Vibe Group as a user of The Bridge Personality together with its sales assessment, describing it as "a fixed part of the recruitment process after an initial introductory interview at the office". The case quotes Dietske Koolhaas, Manager Talent & Acquisition.

Two things follow from that. First, this is a stage rather than a sift: you meet people first, and the questionnaire comes after. Second, because Vibe Group is a staffing firm, you may meet this test through Vibe rather than through the company you eventually work at. If your invitation came from a recruiter rather than from an employer, that is normal here.

What the questionnaire involves

The Bridge Personality is TestGroup's persoonlijkheidstest, and it is unlike most personality questionnaires in one specific way that is worth knowing before you open it.

• 240 statements in 40 screens of six, about 40 minutes, with no time limit any source mentions.
• Six statements on screen at once, each rated on a nine point agree scale from "zeer sterk mee oneens" to "zeer sterk mee eens".
• Anything you rate identically comes back. If two or more statements on a screen get the same answer, those statements are re-presented and you are asked which applies to you most and which least. That is the mechanic, and it is the reason rating everything the same makes the test longer rather than safer.
• No going back. You can change an answer while you are on a screen, but once you press Next it is closed.
• No score. The result is a profile across 34 dimensions in four clusters, each on a sten from 1 to 10 against a norm group of 500, plus three response-style scales, a Jung type and a Bridge colour.

The sales assessment is the same sitting

Vibe Group's case mentions the sales assessment alongside the personality test. The Online Sales Assessment is a reporting variant rather than a separate questionnaire: it produces a sales report scoring six sales stages and four seller types (Hunter, Farmer, Consultant, Negotiator) plus a Big Five personality report, all from one set of answers. So there is one questionnaire to prepare for, not two.

How to prepare for it

Use the full nine points

A profile built from answers between 4 and 6 is flat, which gives an interviewer nothing concrete to work with, and it triggers far more forced-choice screens. Both of those are avoidable by simply committing to an answer.

Answer as a colleague, not as a candidate

The report carries a Sociale wenselijkheid scale for leaning to the flattering answer, an Instemmend antwoorden scale for agreeing with everything, and a flag on every dimension where your rated answers and your forced-choice answers disagree by more than three stens. The forced-choice half is much harder to steer than the rating half, so a strategically answered questionnaire tends to show up as the two halves pulling apart.

Know that a mid score is the normal score

Results come back as stens from 1 to 10 and the scale has a midpoint of 5.5. TestGroup states in its own report that a 5 is not an insufficient result, it is the score most people get. There is no pass mark on this instrument at all.

Be ready to talk it through

A Bridge result is usually delivered in a conversation where someone walks through the dimensions asking whether you recognise yourself in each score. Having one real example ready for your highest and lowest dimensions is worth more than anything you could do while answering.

Vibe Group role families

Internal roles

• Recruitment consultant and account management
• Talent acquisition
• Sales and business development
• Operations, finance and marketing

Placed IT roles

• Software engineering and development
• Data and analytics
• Cloud and infrastructure
• Project and product management

Practise the exact test

Our TestGroup practice hub covers all six Bridge assessments, including The Bridge Personality with its six-statement screens, its nine point scale and its forced-choice tie-break. Our practice content is in English and a Vibe Group assessment may well be in Dutch, so the hub page sets out what transfers and what does not.