The corporate world has for a long time placed an emphasis on trying to find the psychologically and behaviourally perfect recruit. And yet it seems that personality tests themselves have somewhat fallen out of favour.
‘Personality tests are not currently in vogue,’ says Geoff Newman, managing director of Recruitment Genius and Starget. This is partly, he believes, because businesses have abused them, using them to cheaply shortlist candidates or add a stamp of authority to their hiring process.
‘The time testing takes can slow down the recruitment process significantly’
Unreliable, unholistic
While testing can provide insights into a candidate’s personality, says Mark Maclean, HR transformation leader at Deloitte Consulting Southeast Asia, they’re not without limitations. Primarily, he believes, they’re not reliable across scenarios and don’t provide a holistic view of an individual’s personality.
‘They may be a good starting point in the hiring process but they do not provide a comprehensive assessment on which to base a hiring decision,’ he says.
Cost can also be a factor. Abbie Soutar, commercial director at RGF Staffing, observes that working with personality types can be expensive and time consuming as well as a talent deterrent. ‘From a candidate perspective, they can be off-putting, especially for those with professional qualifications who feel they can already demonstrate their worth on paper,’ she says. ‘And the time they take to complete and review can slow down the recruitment process significantly, which if it’s an urgent hire can impact the performance of a project or department.’
‘Individuals will go with the option that makes them jump through fewer hoops’
Beth Turner, director of learning and development at Robert Half, agrees. ‘Testing slows the recruitment process down, which limits the range of candidates an employer will see, particularly in the current market,’ she says.
Turner has also noticed a decline in the use of personality and psychometric testing, and believes this is largely attributable to the candidate-short market. ‘Filling out another form in what may already be an administrative-heavy process can put some candidates off continuing with their application,’ she says. ‘And when there’s a wealth of options available, it’s likely that individuals will go with the one that makes them jump through fewer hoops.’
D&I issues
Then there are also questions around diversity and inclusion. ‘There’s the potential that some managers may end up only recruiting the same type of personality to their teams,’ says Turner.
More importantly, testing for a defined set of desired behaviours, traits and psychometric profiles can exclude people with disabilities, including neurodivergence; it can also allow bias against gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation to creep in. In both these scenarios, stereotypes and socially perceived norms can win out.
‘Ultimately, personality tests are of little value at predicting future success,’ says Newman. ‘Many were based on research conducted almost exclusively on civil servants and military personnel in the 1940s – white males – so aren’t appropriate for the diverse range of people we recruit today. Critically, I know of no personality tests that are re-assessed based on current evidence.’
To achieve inclusivity, Ben Williams, board member for advocacy at the Association for Business Psychology, points to the need to choose a tool carefully. ‘Look at how a test is built,’ he says. ‘Was it trialled on a diverse sample, with a mix of ethnic groups, ages, gender and industry sector?’
Traits not types
Williams sees advantages in working with personality traits, rather than types. Instead of being tagged with one type of personality or another, people are placed on a sliding scale between two possibilities – for example, being extrovert or introvert.
There’s a pressing need to understand how personality types operate in a multicultural context’
Perhaps the best approach is to deploy personality assessments in context and in conjunction with other methods. ‘Take a scale from 0 – where you might as well pick someone’s name from a hat for a job – and 1 being an absolutely perfect prediction,’ says Williams. ‘A personality questionnaire comes out about 0.3, which is seen as on the cusp of acceptable; things like ability tests or assessment centres get up to 0.6, and then with multiple methods you can go higher. You’ll never reach 1 because there’ll always be someone that slips through or got rejected when they should not have been.’
Values and experience
Dr LeMeita Smith, director of clinical services at United Health Services, is seeing a more holistic approach to assessment, where companies understand that while personality can indicate how someone might react in a situation, it’s their lived experiences, values and drive that will determine their actions. She notes that there has been a surge in the application of nuanced, situation-specific and role-relevant assessments.
‘These tests often prioritise skills such as adaptability, cultural fit and conflict resolution abilities, recognising that the modern workplace is both dynamic and diverse,’ she says. ‘Moreover, with increasing globalisation, there’s a pressing need to understand not just individual personality types, but also how these types operate within a multicultural context.’
After all this, though, AI might just do it all anyway. ‘We are already seeing generative AI playing an increasing role in personality testing and the end-to-end recruitment process,’ says Maclean. ‘Algorithms are already being used to “interview” candidates for roles and can learn based on data gathered from each candidate and their success in the role. Ultimately, these tools may replace the more static personality tests currently used by most organisations.’
Psychometrics vs personality types
Psychometric testing is the umbrella term for any psychological characteristic you want to put a number to – be that reasoning, motivation or personality. Testing is carried out in a structured way using statistical analysis techniques.
Personality type modelling, on the other hand, tends to use questionnaires and observation rather than seeking scores to better understand someone’s behaviour, values and motivations. Answer the classic Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire, for example, and you will end up passing through a matrix of 36 different types before falling into one of 16 archetypes, with names such as ‘the architect’, ‘the performer’ and ‘the crafter’.
