Test Reliability - Employment Testing Validity and reliability are two terms that go hand in hand in any discussion of personality assessment or other forms of employment testing. It is important to understand the difference between the two terms. Validity basically refers to research that provides evidence that a test actually measures what it is supposed to measure.
Reliability is more of a measure of consistency.
If you took a tape measured the length of your desk and found it to be 60 inches long, you would expect it to measure 60 inches again tomorrow. You would then have to find out what went wrong with the measurement. A reliable measure of the desk's length would always have to yield the same measure. If it did not we would say that the measure is unreliable. If a person takes a personality assessment today and scores high in a trait like dominance, and we retest that same person six weeks from now, we would expect the score to still be high in dominance.