Unlocking the Real Power of Personality Assessment - The Expert Interpretation
October 5, 2024
Personality profiles are inherently complex tools that require professional expertise to interpret correctly. While they may seem straightforward on the surface, there are many nuances and layers of analysis that the average person isn’t expected to understand.

I have been interpreting personality assessments for 25 years including 17 years of accreditation with Facet5. I have debriefed many thousands of profiles, but it’s my work experience both in an organisational and clinical setting and hearing thousands of people talk about their own profiles, that has enabled me to give clients exceptional value.
Interpreting these reports without training and experience leads to the risk of inaccurate conclusions and unhelpful labelling, bringing bias into the process and ultimately leading to poor decisions about your people. This can negatively impact your team’s performance. Without a skilled interpreter you are also missing out on accessing a wealth of information that goes well beyond what’s in the report.
Here are the top 5 things you should expect from someone interpreting personality profiles.
- The interpretation should go well beyond explaining individual scores and looking at factors in isolation. The interpreter should be explaining how to integrate all the data points to reveal the full picture of the person’s capability and potential. This should include demonstrating how the person’s working style preferences across the Big 5 factors would play out in critical work scenarios.
- The interpreter focuses primarily on commentary and advice that is most relevant to the traits that you’ve identified as the likely success factors in the role. Let’s imagine you are recruiting for an Executive Assistant and you’ve advised the interpreter that success in this role is driven by pragmatism, assertiveness, strong relationship management, good attention to detail and a high degree of resilience. The interpreter’s commentary should call out these traits and explain what the profile reveals about this person’s natural capability in these areas.
- The interpreter should be able to explain why the tool they have chosen for you is the best one for what you are wanting to achieve. The interpreter should also be able to explain the limits of personality profiling including advising you of any bias in the results and how that knowledge can actually be used to your advantage.
- A skilled interpreter of a personality profile should be able to take the integrated results and then add further insight into what is likely going on beneath the surface – the person’s mindset and emotions. This capability comes from my clinical experience which most test interpreters lack. This enables the hiring manager to go to yet another level of understanding of the person for improved results in engaging and developing that person to achieve high performance.
- Finally, the interpretation should give you plenty of useful intel to takeaway. If recruiting, this should include a clear understanding of where to focus further questioning and how to word the questions. Regardless of what stage it is being used at – recruiting, onboarding, team development etc, the interpretation should help you understand the person’s capability and potential so they achieve optimal mental health and performance on the job.