Choosing the right Personality Assessment to find and keep high performers
October 1, 2024
There are hundreds of personality profiling tools available but there are only a few I would use, particularly when seeking to hire, onboard and develop employees into high performers. The following outlines the qualities of the best personality profiling tools and why they are so valuable.
Firstly, let’s be clear on why you need to introduce personality profiling as a key part of your strategy for hiring and managing staff. It’s pretty straight forward. Personality profiling, when added to your existing interview and reference check hiring process, gives you much greater confidence in your selection decisions. Secondly the critical intel you gain through the profiling process gives you a manager’s guide to engaging and developing your employees so they achieve optimal mental health and performance.
So how do we choose which tool is best? Here are the 5 things to look for.
1. It has to be a Big 5 tool
The Big 5 personality theory is the most widely accepted framework for personality. There are plenty of tools that say they are valid and reliable but it’s the ones that specifically measure the Big 5 Personality traits that are the true measures of personality. So, when you are looking at a personality profile, google what the BIG 5 factors are and check that the tool you are looking at measures all of them in a comprehensive way. As an example, many tools don’t measure a person’s emotional style (labelled Neuroticism in the Big5) – their confidence, responsiveness, anxiety, cautiousness and propensity for risk taking. This is a big omission given one’s emotional style is one of the Big 5 factors and has a significant impact on our behaviour.

2. A continuum approach, not type
Many tools emphasise a simple label you can take away and use to describe yourself. But simplicity in the form of labels have a downside. They can create stereotypes, narrow our field of vision about a person and lead to assumptions. People are more complex than a label or type. Big 5 tools describe behaviour on a continuum which leads to a more nuanced and accurate representation of an individual’s personality, as people often exhibit traits to varying degrees.
3. Comprehensive, relevant information
Many personality profiles are light on detail and address a limited number of competencies including ones that are often not priorities in a work context. The best personality profiles provide lots of useful detail about how people are likely to behave across a wide range of critical work-related competencies. This includes identifying strengths, areas for development, motivators and de-motivators and giving you practical information about how you can get the best out of the person.
4. Versatile and user-friendly
A good personality profile has to be easy to access and use, and be of value right across the entire employee lifecycle. It should give you on-line capability to benchmark candidates for closeness of fit to a role’s success profile, and to understand how to best onboard and develop new employees. It should identify where a struggling employee’s risks and challenges are to help you identify a pathway forward. And it should also help you understand your team’s dynamics including how the team could improve its communication and decision making and a host of other high-performance variables.
5. Accurate and reliable data
Arguably the most important factor in choosing a personality tool is its accuracy and reliability.
If we want to make good decisions, we need data that consistently describes a person accurately. When you keep seeing a person’s natural working style play out as per the personality profile, that’s when you know you have the right personality profiling tool. A tool you can trust to consistently predict working style is what gives you the confidence in your hiring decisions and in your ability to build high performing employees.