The Occupational Interaction Assessment is sometimes viewed as being 'easy' because it is a personality test that does not test skills or knowledge. However, it is actually fairly challenging, as it evaluates the candidate’s personality traits to screen for personal qualities that are seen as useful for potential Federal employees.
In this article, we discuss the Occupational Interaction Assessment, as well as provide advice for answering its questions and preparing for them.
What Is the Occupational Interaction Assessment?
The Occupational Interaction Assessment is a personality test used as part of the USA Hire process. It is an extensive questionnaire composed of over 150 questions about the candidate’s habits, interests, and workplace preferences.
Like many other personality tests, the Occupational Interaction Assessment asks candidates to rank statements in accordance with how much they feel the statement describes them or how often they perform the actions described or feel the emotions mentioned.
The Occupational Interaction Assessment is sometimes also called the Computer Adaptive Occupational Interaction Assessment, which means it makes use of computer algorithms to select the next questions that are going to be shown based on your answers to the previous questions. This means it is not possible to ‘game the system' by memorizing questions.
Occupational Interaction Sample Question
Read the following statement and think about the answer that best describes you most of the time:
If I forget to fill out a form with information that others need, I make sure to follow up.
courtesy of USA Hire. Source
This statement evaluates the candidate’s self-discipline, in this case, the ability to follow up and complete tasks that they have set, even though there may not necessarily be an external motivator (e.g. someone reminding them or a superior urging them) to take action.
Candidates with higher scores are viewed as more productive potential employees who can manage themselves and complete assignments on time, whereas lower scores are seen as describing less productive employees who have difficulty completing tasks and waste valuable time or give up easily on tasks. It would be ideal to have employees that motivate themselves rather than those that need to be motivated.
As such, you should choose answers that will result in a higher score associated with the self-discipline trait.
Tips for the Occupational Interaction Assessment
How To Prepare for the Occupational Interaction Assessment
The only way to get things right in this kind of test is to practice. It’s not a test that you can get by on just based on your knowledge from school or college. Nor can you learn about the test by taking the test – remember, if you don’t pass, you need to wait an entire year to retake the test. So if you want to do well on the Occupational Interaction Assessment, you need to practice repeatedly with mock exams that contain questions similar to those in the real test and are time limited to imitate the time limits in the real test.
Start preparing now by getting access to JobTestPrep’s practice pack for the USA Hire assessments, which includes a full sample test and study guide for the Computer-Adaptive Occupational Interaction Assessment.
See also: USA Hire Occupational Reasoning Test