Weeks ago I got my invitation to try the new Good.co, a psychometrics-based analysis tool to help people understand what sort of people and companies they should work with. Today, I finally took the few minutes to answer some questions about me and my ‘boss’, David Card, VP of Research at GigaOM Pro, and the results are a pretty good match with reality, I think.

First of all, I was asked a short series of questions about myself:

And I determined that I was a Dreamer (with overtones of the Inventor), one of the 16 archetypes that arises from the scoring from my answers.

I read that Good.co’s system is based on six factors — similar to the “big five” psychodynamic factors that have become a standard in the industry. As Kerry Schonfield of Good.co explains it, they built on that:

[…] by far the most widely accepted model today is the ‘Big Five’ model, developed in the early sixties by US airforce researchers Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, and popularized in the eighties by Costa and McCrae – probably the best-known proponents of the modern form of the model.

The modern ‘Big Five’ model argues that our pattern of scores on just five dimensions – […] extraversion and neuroticism (emotional stability), plus agreeableness (similar in some ways to [Hans] Eysenck’s psychoticism dimension), conscientiousness, and openness to experience.

All five of these factors are represented in Good.Co’s formula; however, as the Big Five is designed as a general personality measure, our model uses a unique rotated and expanded version of the factors to better capture personality in the specialist environment of the workplace.

As you can see from taking our survey, we assess what you could call the ‘Big Six’: Innovation, Energy, Reliability, Drive, Authority, and Empathy. All these factors are based on a combination of empirical research from the ‘pure’ academic side, plus the more intuitive and applied results from fieldwork in industrial/organisational and vocational psychology.

Each of our archetypes has a unique pattern of scores on the dimensions we assess. Why 16? The simple answer is, why not 16? In theory, we could construct a typology of far more, or less, archetypes. For example, we could classify people in only five ways – based on their highest scoring factor. Or we could break it down and classify people a hundred ways, based on an every-increasingly-complex pattern of scores on factors and sub-factors.

The key is in the balance between accuracy – requiring many archetypes – and practical usability – requiring fewer archetypes. Our belief is that to have too many would defeat the object of creating classifications in the first place, as there would be too much information to be usable.

Apparently, the best place for me to work is a ‘nuclear family':

I answered a few more questions about my “boss”, David Card, and determined that we work together pretty well, because Idealists and Dreamers click.

And GigaOM Research is a Mountaineering Expedition, not the perfect match for me, but not too bad.

Finally, Good.co allows users to contrast themselves with others. While I was taking my pass through, I noticed that the CTO of Good.co, Subbu Balakrisnan had created a Fitscore with me, which showed we would likely get along if we worked together:

I clicked through on his account, and learned what a corporate account has to offer: profiles of teams including what’s missing as roles in teams. I didn’t go down that path — I work primarily as a soloist — but I bet that real insights could be gained in a more corporate set-up than mine.

The Bottom Line

After the experience I had today, I certainly would recommend that people consider using Good.co before taking a new job, and a new boss. The tool is easy to use, intuitive, and well-designed.

Samar Birwadker, the founder of Good.co, says “The risk of hiring someone who’s not a good fit can cost a company $50K on average,” which makes a strong argument as to why an employer would want to a/ build up a company profile based on the responses, and b/ ask the prospective employee to take the test. I would also try to get any prospective employer to join, and to get those I might be working with to use Good.co, too. At the very least, if they said no, that would be a large binary answer to job fit.

The more I poked around the more I wonder how the archetypes would line up with the 3C model I have developed, a cultural pyschodynamic model based on companies being competitive, collaborative, or cooperative (see The Future Of Work In A Social World – Part 1 and Part 2). I will be meeting Samar Birwadker at the upcoming Work Revolution Summit (see Time to join the Work Revolution), so I will be sure to spend some time poking at that question with him.