Paraphrasing an article by Live Science, there are two types of personality in this world: those who believe in using personality tests for hiring and those who do not.
It’s logical to think that employees perform better when their personalities and interests are in harmony with the demands of their roles, and that employers will benefit from selecting such candidates — who are likely to excel, remain engaged long-term, and stay with the organization. At their best, personality tests can provide insights into a candidate’s work style and cultural fit within the organization; by understanding personality traits, employers can create balanced teams that complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
However, while using personality tests can be beneficial, some risks should be considered:
- First, not all tests are suitable for hiring purposes. What’s more, there’s the question of whether a specific test can accurately evaluate what it claims to assess. That’s why, when choosing a personality test for hiring, HRs should look for documentation of a test’s effectiveness in predicting job performance.
- Second, results can be misinterpreted if not analyzed by a trained professional, leading to poor hiring decisions.
- Additionally, some tests may inadvertently favor certain demographics, putting some candidates at an unfair disadvantage.
The controversy behind using personality tests in hiring
The 2021 HBO Max and CNN documentary “Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests” garnered significant attention by examining how personality tests can lead to discriminatory practices when used in the workplace.
The documentary also explores the controversies surrounding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The test was designed during World War II by two Americans, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, respectively, mother and daughter. Neither of them had formal training in psychology. The book “Psychological Types,” written by Carl Jung in 1921, was their biggest inspiration when creating the test.
The MBTI consists of 93 questions that assess the following traits:
- Introversion (I) vs. Extroversion (E)
- Intuition (N) vs. Sensing (S)
- Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)
- Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P)
From the combination of letters/traits, there are 16 possible results, meaning 16 personality types.
Despite its widespread popularity, the test has repeatedly been discredited as unscientific throughout the past decades. In 1991, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine noted the “troublesome discrepancy” between the assessment’s popularity and its lack of proven worth. A 2015 article on Vox.com even stated that “no organization in the 21st century should rely on the test for anything” and that the MBTI has “as much scientific validity as your astrological sign.”
In its entry about the MBTI, the Skeptic’s Dictionary stresses that “Employers may hire, fire, or assign personnel by personality type, despite the fact that the MBTI® is not even reliable at identifying one’s type. Several studies have shown that when retested, even after intervals as short as five weeks, as many as 50 percent will be classified into a different type.”
It should be noted that The Myers-Briggs Company itself has long maintained that the MBTI is intended for non-selective purposes (such as team-building, leadership training, and conflict resolution), not for hiring. As its Senior Director of Global Research, Rich Thompson, explains in the HBO Max/CNN documentary: “Since I’ve been in The Myers-Briggs Company, the admonition has been to not use it for hiring because there’s no reason to assume that a person with one particular type preference can do a job better than someone who has a different type preference. We had a couple of organizations that were using it for hiring. We knew they were using it for hiring. We call them and say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that,’ and they say, ‘Well, we’re going to,’ and so we stopped selling to them.” However, as Thompson himself explains, the combinations of letters of the Myers-Briggs test were never copyrighted and are in the public domain. As a result, there are several knock-offs to the MBTI for a company to go with in case The Myers-Briggs Company refuses to sell them the test.
The limitations of using binaries
A common objection to the MBTI is related to the use of dichotomies. It’s natural to expect that people won’t fall squarely into one category or another but rather fluctuate at different points along a spectrum throughout their lifetime. Jung was aware of that, as he wrote: “there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. They are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency...the tendency to be more influenced by environmental factors, or more influenced by the subjective factor, that’s all. There are people who are fairly well balanced and are just as much influenced from within as from without, or just as little.” The author favors the spelling ‘extravert.’
Risk of bias and discrimination
Another concern critics often raise is that the test allows for cultural bias. One of the interviewees in the HBO Max/CNN documentary is Susan Cain, the best-selling author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” who explains: “American culture really does prefer its extroverts. This is a culture that comes from a kind of veneration of the man of action. You should be the doer, not the thinker; you often hear of a preference for hiring of extroverts. Increasingly now, offices are being designed as these big open social spaces.” Jung himself wrote: “The world in general, particularly America, is extraverted as hell, the introvert has no place.”
“Persona” also raises concerns about the risks of ableism and other forms of discrimination, examining the impact of personality tests on civil rights. Under The Americans with Disabilities Act, employers are prohibited from asking employees about their medical information; however, there is evidence that another popular test, known as the Five-Factor Model (FFM), could indirectly detect mental illnesses, as certain patterns (for example, correlations of high neuroticism and low conscientiousness) can suggest a predisposition to certain disorders.
Finally, the documentary reveals troubling aspects of Isabel Briggs Myers’ personality, including her authorship of a racist novel, and questions whether personality tests are a reflection of their creators’ biases, at least to some degree.
All this criticism aligns with a 2019 article in The New York Times by journalist Quinisha Jackson-Wright, who questioned, “Do personality tests like the Myers-Briggs help managers learn their team’s working styles, or just encourage them to hire and promote people like them?” She recalls taking the MBTI during a quarterly staff retreat at a previous job, and her discomfort: as the only Black woman in the organization, and as an introvert among extroverts, she felt reluctant to share her results as part of a team-building activity. Jackson-Wright highlights academic research on how factors like race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability can affect a person’s understanding of assessment questions.
Does it mean that we should discard personality tests altogether? Not before examining some statistics more closely.
The Five-Factor Model
Interestingly, the Five-Factor Model (FFM) is often considered a more effective predictive tool than the MBTI, partly because it operates on a spectrum rather than using binaries. It measures individuals across five dimensions: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — that’s why some use the acronym OCEAN to refer to the test.
In a recent article, HR entrepreneur Astrid Svedérus advocates for the use of the Five-Factor Model in hiring, stating its differences from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: “MBTI is a type test, it divides people into different personality types, which makes it directly unsuitable for selection. Tests based on the Five-Factor Model are something completely different. Here, you can get high and low results on all dimensions, and the result is compared with a norm group. This makes it significantly more suitable for selection.” The translation from Swedish is ours.
Svedérus points out that studies on the relationships between the dimensions of the Five-Factor Model and work performance found correlations in the order of .05-20, meaning that the results of the personality test (distributed across the five dimensions) can explain an average of 0.25%-4.00% of an individual’s work performance. She highlights that while this has a small explanatory value, other selection methods used early in a recruitment process also have small explanatory values, such as education (0.80%-5.70%), number of years of relevant experience (0.50%), industry experience (up to 0.40%), and cognitive test (4.80%-9.60%). As she explains, even a low explanatory value can be practically relevant, particularly in large organizations with extensive samples, where “small improvements to a recruitment process can mean large economic and social gains over time.” Moreover, “if we have found out which personality traits are important for a specific role, we can therefore reach a tenfold higher explanatory value compared to if we conduct personality tests casually.”
Svedérus believes that “the best, most accurate way to select from a larger pool of candidates is still to combine a cognitive test with a personality test,” defending that “it is also the method that is least susceptible to bias and discrimination.”
Finally, she admits that “there are also situations where personality tests do not contribute to better recruitment,” for example, “when we have few candidates to choose from. Conducting a personality test after or in connection with a structured interview is an example of such a situation. Since the validity of the personality test will often be significantly lower than the validity of the structured interview, we actually risk lowering the accuracy of the selection as a whole.”
An HR perspective
We discussed the topic with Sandy Chow, a senior HR leader and Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the professional body for HR and people development. Chow has led global teams across financial services, energy, and technology sectors, including a Web3 tech startup where she served as VP of People/Chief of Staff.
In addition to questioning the ability of personality tests to predict job performance, Chow expresses concern about potential biases — importantly, she highlights that these are her personal views and opinions, which are not related to her current or previous employers: “Personality tests should not be part of the hiring decision-making process due to potential biases, including cultural and language differences. They do not offer the best candidate experience, as individuals invest time and share private information without knowing if they will secure the job.”
“In my experience, personality tests have never been used as a decisive factor in hiring. This is because they do not demonstrate an individual’s skills, experience, or capability to perform job responsibilities.” She reflects that “especially in startups with limited resources, personality tests are not the most efficient way to acquire talent due to the costs and time involved.”
Chow recommends using personality tests after hiring and leveraging these tools to gain insights on motivating each employee: “I have seen personality tests used post-hiring as a tool to support career development and improve workplace collaboration. When used as a supporting tool, personality tests can enable individuals to perform their best, benefiting both the individual and the business. They offer great insights into an individual’s natural preferences, such as their preferred communication style and motivators, to maximize their potential. They also provide insights into strengths and weaknesses, helping create high-performing teams. Businesses can use test results to take positive actions, such as tailored learning and development offerings, and adaptive processes, policies, and tools to optimize successful collaboration.”
Best practices when using personality tests for hiring
Deciding whether to use personality tests in the hiring process — and, if so, which one to choose — requires careful consideration of the information provided above. Moreover, adhering to best practices is crucial if you are determined to incorporate personality tests into your hiring process.
First, look for documentation proving a test’s ability to predict job performance. Using a personality assessment for hiring when it was not specifically designed for this specific purpose is not advisable.
Additionally, never rely solely on these tests for hiring decisions; instead, incorporate them into a comprehensive hiring process that includes interviews and references. Professional recruiters should give more weight to in-depth interviews in the overall evaluation of a candidate; however, if a test result aligns with observations from the interview process, it may provide additional insight to support decision-making.
Finally, it’s key to honestly reflect on whether any quest for a specific personality type is biased. In addition to ethical concerns, such bias may not be the best commercial strategy. As Chow reflects, “From a commercial perspective, diversity of thought is crucial for problem-solving and minimizing risks. A workforce that reflects its customers provides the best customer experience.”
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