Colour Diagnostic Test for Recruitment or Coaching

One of the challenges facing professional recruiters and coaches today is how to discover the

real person behind the mask of the person they are evaluating. Most tests depend on words.

If you were taking the test, you can analyse the test questions for their implications before giving your final answer. However, you or the test interpreter can be at a loss assessing whether the profile created is the real you or a mask, i.e., how you want to be seen by others.

This inherent weakness of a word-based personality test led to the creation of the Luscher

Colour Diagnostic Test in 1947. The creator, Prof. Dr. Max Luscher, is a Swiss psycho-

therapist who is the world’s authority on colour psychology. He wanted to design a

psychometric test that was simple, universally communicable, and accurate.

Luscher chose colours as his test medium after realizing that there will always be differences

in verbal interpretation. For example, the word cold means differently when applied to

temperature or to the way someone speaks to you over the phone. Language is only as old as

the history of mankind. Colours, on the other hand, have been in existence since the birth of

the universe. Over billions of years, the meaning of colours underwent refinement. When the

human race emerged, colours were one of the earliest media on which there was common

agreement in meaning across all tribes and races.

When you take the colour test, you choose based on your feelings, rather than what you think

is the meaning of the colour. As you look at each colour, your instinct tells you whether you

like or dislike it, in much the same way that you taste a variety of food. You don’t think

whether a food dish is good for your health or not before eating it. It is your taste buds that

you obey.

Similarly, you try and guess whether there is a pattern in a colour test but soon give

up guessing because while you have always preferred red to blue, for example, you don’t

really know why you dislike black or brown. Because you let your feelings dictate your

preferences, your colour test answers are, therefore, more spontaneous and honest, compared

to how you respond in word-based tests where you can somehow predict your psychological

profile.

Each colour, therefore, has the same sub-conscious meaning to any human being. The

universal meaning of these colours has been planted in our DNA, learned after trial-and-error,

as we evolved in our natural history.

Yellow is the colour of the sun and the herald of daytime, when our early ancestors were free to roam to hunt for food and to search for new territory. Yellow represents adventure, cheerfulness and freedom.