The Personality Test That Decides Your Social Media Career What the SHL OPQ Is and Why You Need to Know About It
Every major brand, agency, and media company now runs job candidates through psychometric assessments before hiring. The OPQ the world’s most widely used occupational personality questionnaire is almost certainly going to appear in your job application at some point. Here is exactly what it measures and how to approach it.
You have built a following. Have a portfolio of branded content. You have an interview lined up with a marketing agency, a media company, or a digital platform. And then the email arrives: before the interview, please complete this 25-minute personality questionnaire.
This is not unusual. Over 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use personality assessments in their hiring process, and the social media and influencer marketing industry — which is increasingly a professional hiring market, not just a freelance gig economy — is no different. The tool you are most likely to encounter is the SHL Occupational Personality Questionnaire, or OPQ.
What the SHL OPQ Actually Is
The SHL OPQ — developed by Saville & Holdsworth Ltd, a British company — is a psychometric assessment used by employers worldwide to evaluate how candidates are likely to behave in a professional environment. According to SHL’s official product page, the OPQ measures 32 distinct personality traits organised into three broad areas: how you relate to other people, how you think and solve problems, and how you manage your own feelings and emotions. It takes 20 to 25 minutes to complete and is administered entirely online through SHL’s Talent Central platform.
Major employers that use the SHL OPQ include HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Qantas, Coca-Cola, IKEA, and Heineken — but the list also extends to smaller digital agencies and media companies that have adopted psychometric screening as part of standard recruitment processes.
The Forced-Choice Format: Why You Cannot Just Pick the ‘Good’ Answers
Most personality tests are easy to manipulate — you read the statement, pick the answer that sounds most professional, and move on. The SHL OPQ is designed specifically to prevent this. The most common version (OPQ32r) uses a ‘forced choice’ format: each question presents three statements and asks you to select the one that is most like you and the one that is least like you. All three statements describe desirable behaviours. You cannot simply choose ‘all of the above.’
This forced-choice structure is intentional. It reveals your relative priorities and working preferences even when every available option sounds appealing — and it means that candidates who try to answer strategically often produce inconsistent profiles that are flagged as unreliable.
“The OPQ is not a test you pass or fail in the traditional sense. But employers do use the results to filter candidates — and a profile that is inconsistent or poorly aligned with the role will land you in the rejection pile just as surely as a failed aptitude test.”
Understanding the 32 personality dimensions the test measures — and knowing which traits tend to matter most in creative, social-media-adjacent, and client-facing roles — is what separates candidates who walk into the assessment feeling informed from those who walk in confused. Working through a SHL OPQ practice test gives you a realistic feel for the format and helps you think through how your genuine working preferences map to the specific traits being measured.
Which Traits Matter Most in Social Media and Creative Roles
For roles in content creation, influencer partnerships, social media management, and digital marketing, employers typically look for profiles that show strong scores in persuasiveness and commercial drive, creativity and adaptability, interpersonal confidence and teamwork, and the ability to work under pressure without emotional instability.
This does not mean you should try to engineer your responses to hit these traits. It means you should understand your own working style well enough to answer consistently and authentically — and then position yourself in interviews around the specific traits you genuinely bring to the work. The OPQ gives employers a starting point for structured interview questions. If your profile shows high independence and low rule-following, expect to be asked about your experience working within organisational constraints.
What Happens After You Complete the Assessment
After submitting the OPQ, your responses are compared against a relevant peer group — graduates, professionals, or managers, depending on the role level — and the employer receives a report profiling your behavioural preferences. This report may be used to shape interview questions, inform job fit decisions, or feed into longer-term development planning if you are hired. Knowing that this process exists, and understanding the framework behind it, puts you in a significantly better position than candidates who approach the questionnaire unprepared.
