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Ray Dalio Gives Employees a Personality Test—Here's One Dalio Created That You Can Take for Free

Adam Galica | CNBC

Billionaire Ray Dalio believes in the usefulness of personality assessments — he has used a number of different personality tests for recruitment and management purposes at his hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates.

Now, with the help of expert psychologists, including organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant, Dalio has developed a new online personality assessment that anyone can take for free.

"I did it so that people can learn about themselves and learn about others," Dalio tells CNBC Make It.

The new assessment, called PrinciplesYou, takes about 30 to 40 minutes to complete. According to a press release, the results provide a detailed assessments of thinking style, including tendencies, talents and opportunities for growth, as well as a deep dive into core traits and how they are likely to play out in real life situations.

There is also a feature that allows you to share results, as Dalio created the test in hopes people will share their results with friends, family and colleagues.

"Knowing how you think and how others you interact with think is critical in getting what you want in both your personal life and in work," Dalio said in the press release.

The test took two years to develop and is based on the latest research in personality science, says Brian Little, a personality and motivational psychologist, who helped developed the test. Little is currently a Cambridge University Fellow of the Well-Being Institute and Director of the Social Ecology Research Group in the Department of Psychology.

The test also utilized data that Dalio and his Bridgewater team have complied over the years as "critical for personal and organizational success."

In his book, "Principles," Dalio wrote that he had Microsoft co-founder Bill GatesTesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey take an hour-long personality assessment to figure out how to build up his team's "shaping" skills.

Dalio describes a "shaper" as "someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others," he wrote. By looking at their tests, Dalio says he learned what such successful founders have in common, including a fierce commitment to achieving goals, extreme determination verging on abrasiveness, resilience and attention to detail, among others.

With the new test, according to a Dalio spokesperson, "data is being collected, consistent with [PrinciplesYou's] data privacy policy, and PrinciplesYou is not currently monetizing and has no plans to. PrinicplesYou currently uses the data only to improve the accuracy of the assessment." 

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