What is the site for?

ViewsOnYou helps people and teams work better together. It combines social media with personality and behaviour assessment, measuring the core traits that leading corporations and top headhunters look for, and encompassing the key dimensions common to most psychometric tests. It crowd-sources views on how you work, think and interact, from the people who know you best.

Once you establish a profile of how others see you, you can compare that to:

1. Your self review. Sometimes the difference can be startling!
2. The profiles of your team members. Discover the key strengths and gaps of each of your project teams, to understand why some work better than others, and what you can do to improve them.
3. Your friends and people in your network outside your organisation, eg Clients.
4. Public figures. How do you compare to leaders from business, politics and elsewhere?
5. Benchmarks from companies that you may be interested in.

You can see how your reviews differ from those people who, for example, you report to compared with those people who you do business with.

You also get a summary of the Top 5 traits that your peers associate you with most closely – a snapshot of what makes you, you.

How do individuals build reviews by their peers?

Using a specially developed set of questions covering three character sets; Intelligence, Energy and Interpersonal, users can invite their peers and the people who know them best - co-workers, clients, business partners/associates, family and friends – to provide a professional review of them.

Each set of questions is designed to make any “gaming” counter-productive, by deliberately avoiding free text (to eliminate the invariably glowing "Recommend Me" endorsements), and by using criteria that employers actually look for but specifically with no scoring system. Avoiding a scoring system means that each review is non-judgmental yet insightful. There are no right or wrong answers, and it is surprising what behaviours and characteristics are found to be most highly correlated with different job functions and different companies. The behavioural traits that enable someone to succeed in one function (or one company), are often very different to those that are needed in another function (or another company).

Each review takes around 3 minutes to complete by the reviewer, so is very quick, and avoids embarrassment for both reviewer and reviewee because reviewers aren’t faced with having to choose between obviously negative or positive answers. It is a surprisingly liberating experience, and consequently the reviews aren’t anonymous.

As a user publishes more reviews to their ViewsOnYou profile, a clear picture of them begins to emerge. Both the individual and aggregate reviews a user has received are shown, along with the nature of the connection of the reviewer to the reviewee.

Who should I get to review me?

Anyone who knows you well enough. This could be current and former colleagues, your clients outside the company, and your family.

We recommend you aim for 7 reviews at a minimum, as this is the point when individual bias is minimised. The more reviews you accept, the more you learn, not only seeing how you are genuinely perceived by those around you, but also seeing the differences between one category (eg people you report to, or people who have known you for over 5 years) and another (eg your clients or your friends, or recent acquaintances).

We don’t expect many users to have the same number of reviewers as their number of Linkedin contacts or Facebook friends. This is a more involved engagement with those people who have worked with you.

What should I do with the data once I have it?

1. See how your self-assessment compares with other people’s experiences.
2. Compare yourself to your peers and colleagues by clicking on the “Compare” button on your user home page. You can compare yourself on your Team DNA, Perception Map or Similarity Indexes. You can even see your reviews change over time with your Time Series.
3. Filter the reviews by relationship type or length of time known using the “Filter” buttons.
4. Put together your various project teams and get an insight on why you work together the way you do – and what you might need to do to improve your teams.

What happens if I don’t like a review?

Reviewers give their view on you based on their interactions with you. You can then decide to accept or reject each review you receive. No reviews are published to a user’s public ViewsOnYou profile without their explicit consent. Unless the reviewer has not understood the system (eg if they have put every bar on the left hand side), almost all reviews our users receive are accepted.

Who will see this information? What is the privacy situation?

When you accept a review it is published to your profile. However, you can decide exactly who can view your profile. The default setting, Normal, means your data can be seen on the site and searched on Google. It is a great way of enhancing your professional profile, giving real insight and visibility to prospective Clients and Employers. We also have a number of other privacy settings to allow you to control how public your profile is, and who can see it. You can change this in Account Options > Privacy Options.

We take your privacy very seriously. Check out our Privacy Policy for further details.

What is the science behind the scales?

The scales are based on a combination of the hard-core science behind many psychometric tests and the real world characteristics that leading employers and recruiters actually look for. They represent the core underlying behavioural traits most highly correlated with performance across organisations and functions, but represented in a way that avoids right or wrong answers or 0-10 scales. Some traits that employers look for are inevitably “derived” traits, ie those that are based on a combination of our underlying traits, and are better built up as such.

We are not prescriptive about which traits are good or bad in any situation. And we definitely don’t provide an interpretation of the results. We believe that each person’s unique behavioural traits are matched by a role and a company that is perfect for them. And how a person performs in a team is just as dependent on who else is in that team as themselves. Context is everything. Where we think we can help is to reduce the number of “square pegs in round holes” by giving individuals and teams the tools to see exactly how they fit in to any environment, based on other people’s observations.

How do I add a photo?

Go to Account Options > Edit User Details. Click on “Upload Photo” (on the left). Or connect your existing LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts to ViewsOnYou.

What happens when I connect with LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter?

This simply makes life easier for you by importing your contacts into the site. You can then invite members of your other social networks to review you in your own time. It does not change anything on those sites and the people are not contacted in any way without your permission.

How can I use ViewsOnYou as an employer or recruiter?

ViewsOnYou Employer Dashboard offers a series of tools for recruiters and talent managers both internally and externally.

1. Invite current employees to build a ViewsOnYou profile, and compare them against other members in different teams across your organisation. Discover the key traits of your top performers across functions and departments, and save these benchmarks for hiring, for promotions, and for professional development targets. Give your employees the tools to manage their own careers and their teams better.
2. Invite job applicants to complete a self review and build peer reviews as part of the application process. Compare applicants against each other - using the standard character traits - and against your benchmark or ideal candidate profiles from your existing employees.

Can I add my own questions?

Yes. These can be used either purely internally or also with people applying to your company as part of your unique Employer Brand. They add to the core sliding bars on the site.

How can I find out more information?

Contact Us

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