If you’ve interviewed someone — or been interviewed yourself — for a new role recently, chances are a personality test was part of the process. Once relegated to the back of teen magazines (see “What’s Your Bikini Personality” from Teen Vogue circa 2016), today’s tests are much more sophisticated, research-driven and increasingly being integrated into the 9 to 5.
Every year, upwards of 100 million workers from around the world take psychometric tests (tests designed to study personality and aptitude) deployed by organizations for everything from recruiting and team building to leadership development. A recent survey from the Society of Human Resource Management, a U.S. association that advocates for healthy workplaces, found that 32 percent of HR professionals use personality tests to assess potential candidates for executive roles, while 28 percent use them for hiring for middle management. It’s a $2 billion per year industry — and there are more than 2,000 tests on the market.
“Employers are placing greater emphasis on cultural fit and soft skills, such as communication, adaptability and teamwork.”
This sudden proliferation of tests doesn’t mean that career-related quizzing is new. The practice of assessing workers’ personality quirks as a precursor to hiring has been around since at least the early 1900s. “When the U.S. Army was trying to figure out who to hire as officers during World War One, they used personality assessments,” says Dr. Nikki Blacksmith, an Illinois-based industrial organizational psychologist. According to a 2019 article in Smithsonian Magazine, this form of personality testing — known as the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet — was also used during the war to help the army determine which soldiers might be more susceptible to PTSD. (Soldiers were asked to answer a series of questions that ranged from “Can you sit still without fidgeting?” to “Do you like outdoor life?”)
But personality assessments didn’t really hit the mass market until the 1940s with the arrival of what is arguably still the best-known test of all: the MyersBriggs Type Indicator. Dreamed up by a mother-daughter duo, the MBTI was designed to help people assess their personality types based on the belief that if people only understood each other better, they’d get along better — it remains an underlying principle of many of today’s most popular tests.
Why employers want to measure your emotional intelligence
Perhaps the biggest evolution in workplace assessments, particularly when hiring, is what’s important to employers at the time. The latest trend in testing is a move away from hard skills — like whether or not you’re “proficient” in Microsoft Excel — to skills that might not show up on a typical resume.
“Employers are placing greater stock on cultural fit and soft skills, such as communication, adaptability and teamwork, alongside the traditional focus on technical abilities,” says Diane Brokenshire, a Toronto-based senior human resources executive with more than 20 years’ experience in hiring.
This shift is partly due to the rise in using AI to complete standard tasks, making job-specific hard skills less essential. There is also a greater understanding among employers that emotional intelligence — the ability to manage your emotions and relationships — and alignment with a company’s values are as important as technical skills, and maybe even more so, Brokenshire says.
Increasing interest in hiring for soft skills and personality overall may also be a response to a desire to create more equitable workplaces, along with less hierarchical team structures, says Sara Murphy, an assistant professor in The University of Winnipeg’s Faculty of Business and Administration. There is a greater emphasis on working together, she says, rather than working for or under one person. (Google spent several years and millions of dollars researching its employees to discover that working in teams leads to faster innovation and higher job satisfaction.) “The personality element plays a role in making sure that teams, and their supervisors, can function effectively,” Murphy says. “If you learn that there are people with potentially weaker characteristics within a team, it can help you establish the supports needed to ensure everyone succeeds.”
How personality tests help promote diversity
There is a plethora of personality test models that measure where a candidate lands when it comes to their emotional intelligence — and how that may support a workplace’s success.
Many of today’s tests are based on the Five-Factor Model, which was developed in the 1980s and shows people where they fall on a scale within five major personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. “These personality tests offer a sense of a person’s characteristics and tendencies,” says Murphy. “Typically, within the Five-Factor Model, folks have different profiles based on how they respond to questions that are usually self-reported.”
The Predictive Index (PI) is another widely used self-reported assessment tool created 65 years ago by a former U.S. Army flight navigator who went on to study workplace psychology at Harvard. The PI, which has undergone more than 300 studies to validate its accuracy, asks people questions related to how they’re expected to behave in a work environment and how they actually behave. Based on the adjectives you choose to describe yourself, you will fall somewhere within the tests’ four key factors that predict workplace behavior: dominance, extraversion, patience and formality.
There are many reasons employers are keen to tap into this form of personality data mining, Brokenshire says. “Getting a sense of people’s pre-dominant traits during hiring can make for a more structured and objective way to assess candidates,” she says. “And it can help promote diversity within organizations.” That’s not to say personality tests are entirely without bias, but by standardizing a part of the assessment process (as opposed to having an interviewer ask subjective questions), companies can better evaluate interviewees based on the traits and skills needed for the role, rather than personal impressions.
What your test scores mean
Of course, personality tests should just be one part of the hiring process. You don’t want to overlook candidates who might not match the “ideal” personality profile but who have skills that could still make them desirable employees, Brokenshire says. “For example, a candidate might score low on traditional leadership traits but could excel in innovative thinking and creativity, which might be exactly what a more collaborative or creative role requires.”
For all the insight they may offer, workplace personality tests can’t capture the full complexity of human beings, or the fact that they’re adaptable. “It doesn’t mean that somebody who might feel a bit more comfortable in extroverted situations can’t be an introvert or vice versa,” Murphy says. “It just means they naturally fall towards that end of the scale.”
When considering a career change, analyzing where you land on personality test scores can help you feel more comfortable with the tasks associated with the role you’re interviewing for. (If you score higher on introversion but the position you’re applying for requires a lot of extroverted work, like presentations or pitching to new clients, that’s something to consider before you make the leap, for instance.)
Using your test results to shape — and advance — your career
Personality test results can be used in a myriad of ways that go beyond just getting a new job. They may help you clarify your career goals or offer insight into how to approach different work scenarios, like asking for a promotion, honing presentation skills or communicating more effectively with co-workers. You can also use the results to adapt your leadership style, whether your goal is to become more empathetic or collaborative or assertive, understanding where you are now can help you evolve and grow as a leader.
Personality tests can also help you navigate work relationships. In fact, a test helped Dr. Blacksmith through a communication breakdown with a former colleague. “We were trying to say things in the most effective way we could, but we just couldn’t seem to get our messages across to each other,” she says. They both took personality tests, and the results were telling. “The way I process information and think is very abstract,” Dr. Blacksmith says, “and the way she thinks and processes information is very concrete.”
The two colleagues worked on changing their work relationship entirely. Blacksmith, who was better at blank-canvas, big-picture-ideas, would do the majority of the ideation phase and kickstarting projects while her colleague — who was better at refining, editing and focusing on details — would come in and do just that. “We ended up changing the way we work and putting each other in different places in the workflow, and it greatly increased our efficiency,” Dr. Blacksmith says.
“Not only can personality tests help with identifying different roles on a team, they can also prevent conflict that’s getting in the way of your success.”
Best of all, she says, the frustration they’d been experiencing disappeared from their relationship. “Not only can personality tests help with identifying different roles on a team, they can also prevent conflict that’s getting in the way of your success,” she says. “They help you really understand why somebody else is behaving the way they are, and that makes a huge difference in a working relationship.”
Of course, every individual is so much more than just a series of traits on a test. But personality assessments may foster a more effective and communicative team environment while also helping you tap into your strengths to achieve your career goals. Developing a better understanding of your co-workers — and yourself? That might just be a test worth taking.
A Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in Refinery29, Elle Canada, FASHION Magazine, Chatelaine, The Globe and Mail, and Girlboss, Katherine always aspired to be a journalist. “I had a picture of Anderson Cooper in high school locker,” she says