Technical skills are fairly straightforward to assess. Candidates can demonstrate their competency by obtaining degrees or certifications, while hiring teams can use tools like skill tests and sample assignments to see those capabilities in action. Determining a candidate’s personality, and whether they’ll be a good fit for your team, is often a more challenging prospect. There simply isn’t enough time in the hiring process to get a complete sense of an individual. Along with this, many people don’t behave in a natural way during job interviews. They may be nervous, or trying to put on their best face for the interviewer, both of which can skew their behavior.
Personality tests are one tool that employers often use to overcome this challenge. These are assessments that use multiple choice questions to pinpoint someone’s typical behavior, the values that guide their decisions, how they view the world, and other beneficial insights that can help guide hiring decisions. Like with any tool, getting the most out of a personality test starts with using the right one for your needs and implementing it the right way to yield useful data. These tests also do have their limitations and accompanying cautions you need to take to ensure they’re being used in a fair and functional way.
Data from Psychology Today shows that 80% of Fortune 500 companies use personality testing as part of hiring decisions for upper-level positions. If you’re considering implementing personality tests into your hiring process, here are their most prominent benefits, their potential drawbacks, and some other tips for how to use them the best way.
Types of personality tests used in hiring
Personality testing in hiring isn’t a new concept. It dates back more than a century, to when psychologist Robert S. Woodworth developed the Personal Data Sheet in 1917. These first tests weren’t for employment but were rather developed for soldiers following World War I to help diagnose “shell shock” and other mental disorders.
Today, there are a wide variety of personality tests available and, like Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet, not all of them are designed for hiring. In general, these tests aim to take a snapshot of an individual’s beliefs, morals, and character, as well as classifying aspects of their personality, like whether they’re introverted or extroverted.
Some of the most common personality tests used in hiring today include:
- The Birkman Method – Based on Roger W. Birkman’s Test of Social Comprehension, this is one of the best assessments in a workplace context. It measures an individual’s motivation, self-perception, social perception, and mindset to determine how they are likely to behave and why.
- The DISC Assessment – DISC stands for dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. Taking the test indicates which of those four categories someone best fits into, and what their primary goals and motivations are likely to be as a result. Facilitated DISC assessments also provide information on how an individual’s profile will likely influence or apply to their day-to-day work.
- Myers Briggs – Developed in the early 20th century, the Myers Briggs framework places individuals on four spectrums: extraversion vs. introversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving. The results receive a 4-letter code that is their MBTI type. This test is best for getting a big-picture sense of an individual’s values and personality.
- The Big Five Personality Test – Also called the Five Factor Model, this measures an individual’s traits in five areas: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Like the Myers Briggs, this is a general test that wasn’t specifically designed for employment, but can provide insights into someone’s core identity.
- Hogan Personality Inventory – This is a measure of personality based on the Five Factor Model, but specifically focused on how these traits will influence a person’s job performance.
There are plenty of other personality test formats, as well, some of which are paid services and others that can be taken for free. The main thing you want to steer clear of when you’re choosing a personality test are any designed for identifying mental disorders. These types of tests could land you in legal trouble if they force candidates to disclose a mental disorder, something that’s prohibited by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Pros of personality tests for hiring
1. They’re useful in determining a candidate’s culture fit.
It can be very challenging to get a full sense of a candidate’s personality and values during the brief time you have in an interview. Administering this kind of test can give you a more complete picture of them as a whole person, rather than relying on the brief snippets you observe during the interview process.
2. They can level the playing field and minimize the influence of interviewer bias.
Matters of personality and culture fit are inherently subjective. When they’re left up to human interviewers to determine, this allows room for unconscious biases or assumptions to influence decisions. An objective assessment like a personality test can counterbalance this by comparing candidates on equal footing.
3. They can streamline the hiring process.
If you want to get a complete sense of someone’s personality from interviews alone, it will usually take more than one round of conversation to do so. The issue is, the longer your hiring process takes, the greater the chance you’ll lose candidates to competitors by its end. Employing personality tests can replace those additional interview rounds, allowing you to move candidates through the process faster.
4. They can be used to create personalized interview questions and candidate experiences.
A personality test isn’t only useful for deciding if you’ll hire someone. They can also give valuable insights into how that individual prefers to communicate, how they approach solving problems, and what roles or work environment are the best fit for them. You can use the information gathered in a personality test to create follow-up questions on these kinds of points, tailored to the candidate, allowing you to get a more nuanced picture of the candidate according to the points that matter most to you.
Drawbacks of using personality assessments in your hiring process
1. The answers candidates give may not be completely accurate.
Most personality tests use a series of questions that individuals answer, or scenarios that they provide their likely response to. There are other formats out there, but all have one thing in common: they’re self-reported. This means the individual’s level of self-awareness influences their accuracy—someone is reporting how they think they’d respond, not necessarily how they have actually responded in the past. Adding to this issue is that some job seekers will answer what they think the employer wants to hear rather than basing their answers on what they’d actually do.
There’s another element to this, too, which is that personality is not a fixed characteristic. It is a fluid quality that changes over time as people add experiences and learn about themselves and their world. Even a test that’s administered accurately will only give a snapshot of that individual at that moment in time, and isn’t necessarily a good indicator of their long-term behavior.
2. They could screen out otherwise qualified applicants.
Personality is only one aspect of what makes someone a strong or poor employee. Even aside from the influence of skills and knowledge, there’s the fact that people can learn how to behave in a way counter to their base personality, so a personality assessment isn’t always a direct indicator of behavior.
Personality tests also don’t factor cultural education or background into their assessments. This can particularly skew answers based around moral judgments or expectations that vary from one culture to the next. You need to be careful that the test you administer isn’t eliminating people simply from bringing a different perspective, or you could end up unintentionally limiting your diversity.
3. Accurately assessing the results can be costly or time-consuming.
Many of the personality tests above can be taken for free, but that doesn’t mean there’s no cost associated with them. Learning to interpret those results correctly can take time, and not every HR professional is qualified to make those determinations. In other cases there’s a more direct cost for paid services that both administer and analyze the test for you. In either case, it will require the use of some resources, and not every employer finds them worth that investment.
Best practices for using personality tests to assess candidates
1. Avoid using questions that could impose bias on the process.
We’ve mentioned a few tips related to this already in regards to disabilities, mental illness, or cultural differences. Determining which questions are biased isn’t always as easy as you might think at first glance, especially if the person making those decisions belongs to the majority group.
A test that is discriminatory can do more than cost you otherwise great employees. It could land your company in legal hot water, too. That happened to Best Buy in 2018, when the EEOC determined their personality tests were discriminatory. They’re not the only company that has faced this issue, either. It’s smart to review current and recent lawsuits related to personality tests to identify questions in your own assessments that may be discriminatory.
2. Know your goals for the test and choose an assessment to match.
Not every test is going to be equally useful for every industry, workplace, role, and situation. Before you implement a personality test, start by identifying exactly what you want to learn from it. Do you just want to get to know candidates better, or are you looking for specific traits or qualities? Once you have this goal in mind, you can review the details of the various test options to find the one that will best provide the type of answers you’re seeking.
3. Balance personality tests with other types of assessment.
Personality tests can be a useful supplemental tool during the hiring process, but they’re not something you want to rely on exclusively to make these decisions. Instead, they should be considered alongside face-to-face interviews, resume reviews, skill tests, sample assignments, and other forms of assessment. This can help to ensure you’re not eliminating otherwise qualified applicants, and can help keep you out of legal trouble like the EEOC lawsuits mentioned above.
4. Regularly review and adjust your tests and questions.
As you administer personality tests, you’ll likely find that some questions are a better indicator of an employee’s workplace performance than others. Use this information to refine your test over time. Keep track of the new employee’s productivity, job success, how long they stay after being hired, and similar data regarding their job performance. Over time, you can use this to identify questions that have a strong correlation to workplace success, as well as those that don’t and that can be removed from future assessments.
5. Be sure you’re not looking for a “purple squirrel.”
“Purple squirrel” is a term used by recruiters to describe a candidate who is a precise and ideal match for every single qualification. In short, it’s an applicant who is absolutely perfect in every respect—and, in almost every situation, is an applicant who doesn’t actually exist.
Nobody is perfect, and that includes job seekers and employees. Having a wealth of assessment options at your fingertips can be a positive thing for identifying the right employees, and you absolutely do want to make sure you’re hiring the best people for your role. On the other hand, though, you don’t want to let your access to these insights prevent you from taking action because you’re waiting for a perfect candidate.
When it comes to choosing candidates, personality tests should be of secondary importance to other factors like their skills and experience. The first priority is to find someone who can perform the job well. If their personality type isn’t completely in alignment with your team, that isn’t necessarily a deal breaker if they’re a strong contender in other ways.
