Pre-Employment Personality Test

Personality tests can increase the likelihood of making good hiring decisions compared to hiring solely based on past experience and job interviews. Firstly, there is extensive research that has shown a correlation between job performance and certain personality factors and characteristics. For example, a high conscientiousness is positively linked to job performance across a number of job types. Secondly, a strong insight into an applicant’s personality, helps with facilitate professional interviews and onboarding. Lastly, they provide objective data that can be used to evaluate and compare applicants in a fair and consistent manner. This helps reduce unconscious biases that can occur during the hiring process.

When it comes to making employment decisions, personality tests can be a useful tool as they help improve hiring accuracy, job interviews and onboarding. However, we recommend that you only use personality tests that are validated by a psychologist and focused on hiring. In additional to this, we recommend to combine personality tests with aptitude, skills, and emotional intelligence tests for a more holistic candidate evaluation, and improved hiring accuracy.

Personality tests can essentially be used for all job types. However, a more accurate result should be expected if the personality test is customized for the specific role. We recommend administering a personality test as part of the screening process for all applicants as it increases the hiring accuracy and provides valuable insights into an applicant’s suitability for a particular role ahead of the job interview. Further, it also moves subjective biases from the hiring process.

The use of personality tests is becoming increasingly popular, with a growing list of organizations from Fortune 500 companies to small and medium-sized companies, that want to professionalize their recruitment. It is estimated that around 75% of organizations with more than 100 employees use pre-employment tests such as personality and aptitude tests for hiring. Further, it is estimated that around 80% of fortune 500 companies use personality test for employee development and coaching.

Personality tests should be built in a way that they are not discriminatory, and it can be documented as part of the creation process by a phycologist. However, if a personality test is built without the involvement of a phycologist, and/or there is no documentation on the properties of the test, then it can run the risk of being discriminatory and may not be applicable for hiring.

The Big 5 personality test is a framework for understanding and measuring an individual's personality. The test focuses on measuring five factors of an individual’s personality: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism/emotional stability. This is why the test is also referred to as OCEAN or the Five Factor Model. There are many providers of Big 5 personality tests. The professional providers will be able to decompose the 5 five factors into associated characteristics, and further decompose these into expected behaviours. Further, it is important that the providers have data on which behaviours are desirable for different jobs.

The Big 5 test works by gathering data using a questionnaire that assesses the extent to which an individual agrees or disagrees with personality statements relating to the five personality factors. The professional providers will include a score for the characteristics that exist within each factor and a detailed descriptions of the expected behaviour. In addition this, the test should have been validated by a physiologist, and have achieved a strong reliability score. In a hiring context, it is also important that the test content is relevant to the specific job, and that it also measures potential impression management by the applicant.