IF only we could avoid wishful thinking. It's time consuming and unproductive. Its illusory effects and fantasy features are often what keep us in bad jobs, wrong relationships, rented accommodation and doing the Lotto.

It's what keeps those 600page tomes of wisdom by our beds - unread - and that sexy, size-too-small shirt, unworn (for now) in our wardrobes.

The longer we spend wishing, the more painful it then is to go back and see things as they are; to learn to accommodate our expectations and hopes to the real mediocrity of our personalities and limitations of our lives.

Wishful thinking isn't all bad though. It keeps us from disenchantment, because when we're doing the 'if only' thinking, we wilfully mistake it for ambition or reasonable, rational, appropriate intention and it feeds into our understandable and not very deep-rooted psychological need for the humdrum effort-reward reality of living to be temporarily suspended.

Then we luxuriate in illusions of greater things and grab a modicum of fantasised self-satisfaction, if not occasional smugness.

Wishful thinking serves many purposes and can be good for our health when providing a relief from reality, while unleashing energy and potential otherwise engaged in regret;

a sort of cognitive diffusion technique to dissipate lingering negative thoughts about our selves, our future and our own undervalued role at work.

But when we let our wishes about what might have been , or could easily (not) be, blind us to reality, it can bring about mayhem and chaos not conducive either to personal growth or, where work is concerned, proper person-job fit.

Just because we'd like to be management material doesn't mean we are; even if we have the self-belief, confidence and career orientation to snare a top job, our route to the position may say more about our dominance and go-getting motives than about any abilities to lead, motivate, nurture and support, the real personal characteristics required of effective managers. Be careful what your new recruits wish for. . .

What we wish for is an idealised version of ourselves, of course. And we all know that what we see in the mirror is usually a version of ourselves, upgraded to go easy on the ego, if not the eye.

While we all linger under little illusions that we're nicer, cuter, more engaging than we really are, the really smart people - and psychologists, too - know that whatever we think about ourselves, however we rate our behaviour and catalogue our success, it probably bears little relation to how others view, regard and rate us.

What's a chatty, gregarious guy to that person is often a domineering bore to others, and what Moira regards as her talent for bringing people together may be seen as needy, interfering possessiveness to those around her.

When it comes to telling the truth to ourselves, we're not great. And when that truth concerns our personalities and core characteristics, we're sort of, kind of, totally biased. In our own favour.

It's known as self-serving bias and is self-explanatory. Its first cousin is attribution bias and it's closely related to the array of justification mechanism we use to explain away the things we do which don't fit in with the things we want to be seen to do and fill-in the gap that exists between the me I am and the me I think I am/wish I was/want people to see me as.

That's why personality testing is so useful and provides the best real reflection of who we are, whether to ourselves as part of a developmental process, to potential employers as part of a recruitment process, or to business partners as a tool to be used to assess whether Bill is the best bet to join the small team in product management or will his extrovert thinking style really grate on the nerves of the introverted sensitivities of the others?

The array of robust, reliable personality inventories and type indicators which can provide an insight into how a person really behaves in different circumstances is vast and as the employment relationship becomes more contentious and personal style more recognised within workplaces, the place of the personality profile is set to take a big leap forward.

Personality testing will, if not replace, then surely usurp the overused, often irrelevant interview any day now. It cuts through the self-serving bias that leaks into everything we do. The CV is a slave to the craft of self-serving and the interview, whether competence-based or otherwise, honours the tradition.

"How well can you promote yourself and tell us what you know we want to hear, " they shriek, and we all provide the chorus. All one needs to be successful in these domains is to know what the other requires, and then fake it.

In good personality profiles, like the Myers Briggs, the 16 PF, and MMPI, a whiff of Machiavellian egocentricity, blame externalisation, malingering and selfdeception can be exposed.

Profile typing relies on one's answers about oneself, but the purpose of the question and the rightness or wrongness of an answer is not obvious to most people being tested. This means that while there will be a degree of impression management and an aim - 'cos we're wishful thinkers and deceivers - to 'look good' involved, it's not easy to fake it when answering.

Other test types rely on implicit reasoning conundrums to assess how people make decisions, how logical they are and how swayed they are by ethics.

These indirect, concealedpurpose tests allow potential employers or bodies to make inferences as to the appropriateness of a person to the environment and bypass explicit selfperception gained in traditional self reports and CVs.

Other instruments, which rely more stringently on a person's job-related characteristics, assess, for instance, their attention to detail, their tendency toward abstraction or a preference for concrete activities or a need for achievement.

The Master Person Analysis (MPA) provides a person-job matching profile, mapping the person type to the job requirement type online for quick and easy visual indication. Those from psychological consultancies such as Pearn Kandola and Saville and Holdsworth, among many others, offer reliable tools to measure personal and taskspecific attitudes, orientations and personal preferences to see who would best suit not merely a specific job type but an organisational culture or fit into a pre-existing team dynamic.