Personality assessment tools are more accurate and sophisticated than ever; and they can help you find, keep the best employees.
The use of personality assessment tools is growing—as much as 10% annually—because they help organizations effectively predict which candidates will be the best fit for their job openings and their company culture. You also can use these for training and onboarding to determine career paths for new hires and reinforce the connection between job roles, personal satisfaction, and the company culture. There are thousands of these tools, but eight of the most popular are highlighted here.
California Psychological Inventory (CPI). This helps organizations identify employees who are most likely to interact well with others and predict how people will react to different situations. It provides feedback and insights on work-related characteristics such as sociability, conceptual understanding, and independence. The assessment also is designed to identify people who falsely answer questions to improve their results.
Caliper Profile. This looks at 25-plus personality traits related to on-the-job achievements and identifies strengths, weaknesses, potential, and motivation factors. Specifically, it assesses empathy, leadership, and time management. By examining both positive and negative features, as well as certain personality aspects, it can enable you to identify what people might be right for different roles. For instance, traits such as aggressiveness, passivity, or outspokenness might be advantageous in some jobs and troublesome for others.
DISC Assessment. This tool uses questions about behaviors and beliefs to categorize individuals within four personality styles—dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. The results give you an idea about workers’ potential behaviors in various situations.
Gallup StrengthsFinder. This tool focuses on the person’s strengths and highlights his or her top five attributes out of 34 possibilities. This includes characteristics such as positivity, achievement, and helpfulness. It is useful because of its focus on traits that are important to workplace success.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). This tool is designed to determine a job candidate’s readiness for work situations in which they might experience significant psychological stress. However, it’s administration and evaluation must be supervised by a psychologist.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Perhaps the best-known assessment tool, this assessment looks at variables such as world focus, information-gathering, decision-making, and interaction style and categorizes individuals according to how their strongest traits interrelate.
16 Personality Factor (pf) Questionnaire. Used in workplaces, as well as academic and counseling settings, this assessment measures 16 personality dimensions, including warmth, social boldness, openness to change, self-reliance, and perfectionism. Researchers have found this assessment to be especially valid when results are compared to similar assessments.
SHL Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ). This assessment is used to determine how someone’s behavioral style might affect job performance. It measures 32 performance-relevant characteristics grouped into categories such as relationships and sociability. The British Psychological Society evaluated this test back in 2007 and gave it a very high rating for quality, validity, and reliability.
Using one or more of these assessments can help you identify the best candidates for each job as well as general matches for your company’s culture. However, they are most effective as part of a customized hiring plan that includes a variety of analytics.
