What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to “bounce back” from difficulty, disappointment, and disadvantaged circumstances.
Someone scoring high in resilience is more likely to stay focused on their goal when facing difficulty. They’re also less likely to suffer from what we call ‘burnout’, especially in emotionally-charged jobs like nursing, or insurance claims handling.
On the other end of the spectrum, low resilience can lead to focusing too much on the negative outcomes of a situation, and can make it more difficult to properly focus on tasks at hand.
Interestingly, there are times when someone can be too resilient. Overly resilient people can bounce back from adversity too quickly, failing to take enough time to reflect following setbacks, and to learn from any errors.
Why is it hard to measure resilience?
There are two reasons why it’s traditionally tough to measure resilience:
- Self-reported data
If you ask a candidate whether they’re resilient, they’ll often say yes – presuming that it’s what you want to hear. That doesn’t mean they actually are resilient, of course…
This is the problem with what’s known as self-reported data – where candidates tell you about their own personalities. And it means that assessment methods with self-report at their heart, like question-based assessments, or interviews, aren’t great at measuring resilience (or any trait, for that matter!).
- Complexity
Resilience, as this (pretty dense) article highlights, is a complicated trait, linked to various different psychological constructs like:
- Optimism
- Creativity
- Sociability, and many more
That means it can be hard to define and understand resilience, opening the door to both unreliable measurement (when you don’t measure the same thing regularly) and poor construct validity (when a test doesn’t actually measure what it says it measures).
Measuring resilience with Arctic Shores
Our psychometric assessment makes it easy for you to see how resilient your candidates are – handy in a world that never stands still.
By measuring their unique behaviour in action with online tasks, you can see how they respond to setbacks in real time. All without asking them a single question. That way, you needn’t worry about faked responses, and can instead see an authentic picture of your candidates’ true resilience.
Academics have linked resilience to better workplace performance. Keen to see it in your candidates? Then let’s chat about how our game-based assessment can help. Just click here, and arrange your free demo in under sixty seconds.
