TL;DR

Personality assessments measure stable psychological traits to predict how someone is likely to behave in a work environment. Used in hiring, they add a structured data point beyond resume and interview - but only when applied and interpreted correctly.

What Personality Assessments Actually Measure

Most personality assessments are not trying to find out whether someone is likeable. They're attempting to measure relatively stable dimensions of how a person tends to think, interact, and respond to pressure - dimensions that influence job performance in ways that competency interviews sometimes miss.

The dominant frameworks in workplace assessment include:

The Big Five (OCEAN): Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. Backed by decades of research, widely accepted in industrial psychology. Conscientiousness, in particular, is one of the most consistent predictors of job performance across role types.

MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator): Organises preferences across four dimensions into 16 types. Extremely popular in organisational settings; notably less supported by psychometric research than the Big Five. Better used for self-reflection and team communication than hiring decisions.

Hogan Assessments: Designed specifically for workplace prediction. Three tools: Hogan Personality Inventory (bright side), Hogan Development Survey (derailers), and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (values and drivers). Used heavily in leadership assessment.

OPQ (Occupational Personality Questionnaire): SHL's assessment, widely used in European hiring and development contexts.

The distinction that matters is whether an assessment is normed on working populations and validated against job performance. Consumer personality tools (16Personalities being the most popular example) are built for engagement, not prediction.

Why It Matters for Recruitment

Personality assessments solve a specific problem: interviews are poor at capturing how someone actually behaves under real conditions. Candidates prepare, self-present, and respond to what they perceive the interviewer wants. A well-designed personality tool, administered correctly, provides a consistent data point that's harder to game.

For volume hiring, assessments are often used to filter early - before a phone screen, as part of an online application process. The logic is that if a role requires high levels of detail orientation and emotional stability (a compliance analyst, say), a quick personality screen can deprioritise candidates whose profiles don't align, saving interview time.

For senior hires, assessments are more often used to inform conversation rather than to filter. A hiring manager briefed on a candidate's personality profile before the final interview can probe specific areas - a high derailer score on cautiousness, for instance, might prompt questions about decision-making under ambiguity.

The risk with personality assessments is in how organisations use them. Using personality tools as a proxy for intelligence or job-specific skill, or making hiring decisions based primarily on personality data, tends to both underperform and create legal exposure. In the UK and EU, if an assessment has adverse impact on a protected group and the employer can't demonstrate job-relevance, it fails the proportionality test.

A well-run assessment process uses personality data as one input alongside structured interview scores, skills tests, and work samples.

In Practice

A financial services firm is hiring 40 graduate analysts annually. They receive 1,800 applications. Interview capacity tops out at 120 candidates. They need to get from 1,800 to 120 using something more defensible than "looks like a good fit on paper."

They introduce a Big Five-based assessment after the application stage. Candidates spend 20 minutes completing the questionnaire. The firm uses their own validation data (built over 5 years of tracking hire quality against assessment scores) to weight the results: high Conscientiousness and moderate Agreeableness correlate positively with analyst performance ratings at 12 months; very high Neuroticism correlates negatively.

The assessment doesn't make the decision. It produces a score that, combined with academic performance and a 15-minute video screen, gets 1,800 applications to 120 invitations for in-person assessment centres. Attrition from that stage is tracked and fed back into the model annually. The process is documented and auditable.

Key Facts