Personality tests are an increasingly popular tool in the HR and recruitment world, with a majority of Fortune 500 companies using some form of personality assessment. The appeal of using a personality test is obvious — being able to efficiently sort job candidates and team members based on their temperament allows you to make informed decisions about whether to hire them and set them up to do their best work. Depending on the type of test and the nature of the job, the results of the test can show you characteristics like autonomy, collaborative skills, and ability to handle high-pressure situations, among other things.
Despite this appeal, there are some significant drawbacks and issues. The overall ability of these sorts of tests to assess behavior depends on the methodology, and research has found very little statistical correlation between job performance and personality assessment results. Moreover, ‘personality’ can be highly relative, with a person expressing many different facets at different times, using their cognition to act one way at work and another in their personal life. Finally, there is potential to sustain or worsen biases in the hiring process, or to make current and future employees feel uncomfortable with the idea that their psychological makeup is being assessed and cataloged by their employers. Here are some of the key benefits and pitfalls of using personality tests at your organization:
Benefits of using personality tests
Getting a more well-rounded portrait of potential hires
It’s telling that personality tests are most commonly used during executive and management hiring processes — anyone involved in that sort of search is likely to understand the gravity of their decision, and so feels compelled to gather every piece of relevant information they can. Anyone who has been part of a hiring process knows that interviews, resumes, and all the standard assessment tools can only say so much. Even companies like Google, well known for difficult interviews and involved skills assessments, frequently make changes that hint at the difficulty of successful hiring.
A personality test can be a much quicker way to address this complex problem, giving you a standardized tool to measure what kind of team member or leader each candidate will be. Not only does it provide these insights to you and your team, but it can also shorten the interview process, which is more respectful of each candidate’s time.
Utilizing science and evidence over ‘vibes’
Depending on the size and resources of your organization, you may or may not have an HR professional or team dedicated to hiring and retaining employees. Even larger organizations typically involve non-HR employees at some level of the hiring process, tasking them with interviewing potential teammates. While these interviews are invaluable both for the team members and the potential hires to suss out whether or not they fit in at a given organization, most employees do not have formal training in these kinds of interviews and may base their assessment on intuition or other less-than-scientific approaches. These feelings can be informative but also highly flawed, hiding biases and offering an inaccurate assessment of an otherwise worthy and potentially valuable team member.
Personality tests can’t replace the value of these interviews, but they can provide you with other, more scientific evidence upon which to base your decision. Not everyone is comfortable or confident in an interview environment, and having an additional data point can help you identify candidates who might make a valuable addition even if they don’t interview well.
Risks of using personality tests
Scientific and organizational value is still unclear
As with any product, the selling points of personality tests are often amplified outside of what you can reasonably expect. Cutting through the marketing around each type of test and assessment is essential, as you need to determine whether a given test is scientifically rigorous, unbiased, and supported by research. Even a cursory exploration of the personality test space reveals that there isn’t a lot of solid ground to stand on — while methods like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Big Five personality traits are popular tools, they aren’t necessarily predictive of job performance. In fact, some research shows that these personality tests have little correlation with performance. Other research has shown that these test results are highly malleable, and a person taking a test can have a wildly different result week to week.
While incorporating these tests has a clear attraction, you should be prepared to do your research to determine which one makes sense for your organization and passes scientific muster.
Replication of biases can expose you to risk
Another selling point marketed by personality test providers is the ability to cut through unconscious bias and get a deeper understanding of each candidate. This follows a basic logic, as the tests are primarily focused on emotion and cognition. However, the real world results are not as straightforward. Several high-profile suits filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against large companies like Target found that the personality tests these companies used were discriminatory in nature, costing millions of dollars in legal settlements. Because of the dearth of research and evidence affirming a lack of bias, using a personality test could present a legal risk, as you would need to somehow prove that this bias did not exist.
If and when you choose to start using a personality test, it’s important that you choose one with abundant evidence to prove its credibility as an unbiased tool. Even for tests which have this kind of scientific backing, you should be careful about how much you weigh these results against other factors, and instead use the test results as one factor in a larger picture of each candidate.
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The information contained in this article is not a substitute for legal advice or counsel and has been pulled from multiple sources.
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