From a Snapshot to a Story
Let us be absolutely clear: what we call personality assessment today is, in most cases, primarily a way of capturing and fixing a particular state. An individual is presented with a series of closed statements and asked to indicate whether they agree or disagree. Their answers are then translated into scales, curves and profiles. The result appears precise. But this is only an appearance of precision.
A psychometric test, however carefully designed, captures only a snapshot: an image of who a person believes they are, or who they would like to be, at the precise moment when they are answering.
Bergson saw this problem long ago, with a clarity that time has not diminished: our intelligence has a tendency to immobilize everything it touches. It breaks the continuous movement of life into a series of separate images, much like a cinematograph artificially reconstructs movement from still frames. We believe we have captured a person because we have captured their states. In reality, we have captured only snapshots of a flow that, by its very nature, escapes us.
The result is familiar to everyone: profiles that ultimately tend to look alike; curves that describe traits without ever telling the story of a life; and candidates who only half-recognize themselves in a twelve-page report produced by an algorithm that has never seen them act.
Replacing Self-Description with Memory
There is, however, another approach, equally demanding but radically different in what it seeks to understand. Instead of asking a person to describe themselves, we ask them to remember.
For example: “Tell me about a specific moment when you felt joy and when that joy brought something positive to someone else.”
The question is not directed at a state, but at movement: at a specific moment that lasts, unfolds and has a “before” and an “after”; at a person who changes because someone else has affected them.
This is precisely what Bergson called duration (durée): not a sequence of motionless points arranged on a scale, but a continuous flow in which the past extends into the present and shapes it.
This shift is not simply a methodological refinement. It changes the very object of inquiry. A test looks for a trait; a story looks for an impulse (élan) – in the strong sense Bergson gave the word: an inner force that runs through a person’s life and carries them forward, without its direction being predetermined or being the result of mere chance.
Bergson later developed this concept on the scale of the whole of animal life in his work Creative Evolution. And this impulse never reveals itself on the first attempt. The first answer is almost always general and cautious, still trapped within the categories we believe we ought to use when talking about ourselves.
The question therefore needs to be asked again – three times, five times, patiently – until the person stops describing themselves and starts genuinely remembering; until, in a specific memory lasting five minutes or an hour, they discover what made them truly themselves.
This is not introspection. It is a change in perspective toward what is most real within us and, at the same time, most difficult to see.
What This Changes in Practice
Let us turn to the practical implications. An interview based on storytelling is fundamentally different from a test-based interview. It has no grid, assessment table or score. It has one requirement: to listen, record the exact words and reject generalities.
When a candidate mentions revenue, a bonus or market share, they should be gently asked for a more “human” example. Not out of excessive modesty, but because what we are looking for cannot be found in the measurable result itself. It lies in what changed for a particular person through their interaction with someone else.
More than ten years spent recruiting senior executives in Central Europe have taught Laval one thing that has never been disproved: a psychometric profile can describe someone with great accuracy and still completely miss what constitutes their key difference.
That difference is never a fixed trait. It is a way of moving through time, a form of continuity that can only be revealed through a story.
One Sentence Across Three to Five Stories
Each story, taken on its own, still tells us very little. It is only through repetition that a common thread begins to emerge: the same words return in different contexts, in moments of life that have nothing in common except the person who experienced them.
Out of this diversity, a sense of unity gradually emerges. It is not an external construction imposed by the recruiter, but the recognition of something that repeatedly reveals itself across different moments of a person’s life as a single underlying principle.
Bergson gives this movement a precise meaning, while immediately moving away from what we might expect: it is not a return to a fixed and unchanging point, to a destination where everything would finally come to rest. A person’s unity never stops in this way. It continues to take shape through time.
An individual therefore does not possess a fixed “what” that can be extracted and named once and for all. They have a particular way of enduring through time, a tendency that develops and may only become visible along the way. We are not therefore looking for an immutable essence, but for a living impulse.
To write a single sentence at the end of an interview, based on three to five different memories, is to take this double step: to return to a sense of unity without ever fixing it permanently. We are not trying to define an essence. We are trying to name an impulse that can only be recognized retrospectively, through action and through the repetition of its manifestations.
This sentence is not simply a clever synthesis. It is the moment when the candidate finally hears their own unity expressed in words and simply says: “Yes, that’s me.”
A Person Is Not the Sum of Their Results
At this point, it might seem that we have left the field of recruitment and entered the realm of speculation. We have not. On the contrary, the principle is almost uncomfortably simple: a test is completed; a story is told.
The first approach immobilizes the moment; the second rediscovers movement. And once that movement has been found and named, it becomes a compass, whereas a checked box can never guide anyone.
Measuring a particular state is within the capabilities of any questionnaire. Bringing an inner impulse to light, however, will remain a human and patient task for a long time to come – one that requires time.
Life cannot be added up like a column of numbers. It is composed like a melody, in which each note carries the trace of the one before it while calling forth the one that follows. We can understand a piece of music only if we listen to it to the end. In the same way, we can understand a person only if we listen to them as they remember.
Everything else is merely solfège – the theory of music.