This document discusses the use of personality testing in hiring and presents both sides of the debate. It begins by explaining why employers use personality tests, such as to accelerate hiring and reduce costs associated with bad hires. However, it also outlines concerns with personality testing, such as potential discrimination, privacy issues, and questions around the validity and reliability of such tests. The document concludes by suggesting alternative hiring tools that take a more holistic approach by combining various assessments rather than relying solely on personality tests.

1. Running Head: THE USE OF PERSONALITY TESTING AS A HIRING TOOL: WHY IS IT STILL A THING?
Human Capital Management
(G2)
OBHR201
The Use of Personality Testing as a Hiring Tool: Why is it Still a Thing?
Prepared for: Fermin Diez
Roman Svetkin (G1617072R)
November 10, 2016

2. The Use of Personality Testing as a Hiring Tool: Why is it Still a Thing?
2
Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................3
Reasons why employers use personality tests........................................................................3
Benefits of personality testing in the workplace....................................................................4
Possible concerns and dangers of personality testing as a hiring tool....................................5
Possible alternatives and successors of personality testing in the work environment............6
Conclusion and findings.........................................................................................................7

3. The Use of Personality Testing as a Hiring Tool: Why is it Still a Thing?
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Introduction
Which kind of personality assessment does your employer use: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, IPIP-NEO Personality
Test, or Kolbe Index? In the 20th
century, the application of personality tests in the workplace was widespread and
unchallenged. It was a common practice to test workers to determine “a good fit” for a company without anyone
questioning this process (Grant, 2013). According to the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology,
“13% of US employers utilize personality assessments; 10,000 employees, 2,500 colleges, and 200 federal agencies
use the well-known Myers-Briggs test. Companies that use these types of assessments include McKinsey &
Company, the CIA, the Department of State, and 89 of the Fortune 100companies” (Schings, 2014). However,
whether personality tests are valid and necessary in the workplace have been a topic of dispute for the most of the
last decade (Millard, 2016). Their validity, application, and use are fiercely debated and differently perceived in the
business world. Some compare its effectiveness to Zodiac signs while others swear by it and forecast the employee
performance based on a personality test result. This research paper will delve deeper into the rationale of companies
behind relying solely on personality testing as a hiring tool at first rounds of screening to eliminate unsuitable
candidates. In addition to concerns about and dangers of personality tests in the hiring process, possible hiring tools
in the workplace will be introduced as alternatives to personality testing, and these alternatives will be structured in
a way to maximize the effectiveness when it comes to recruitment and hiring.
Why do employers use personality tests in general?
The use of personality tests dates back to the 1980s when the use of polygraph in the workplace was delegalized by
the US government, according to Employee Polygraph Protection Act (Chin, 1989). After that, personality tests
substituted polygraphs and recruiters resorted to testing potential employees extensively. In the modern workplace,
job applicants take personality tests even before getting interviewed and having their resumes screened. Moreover,
according to The Wall Street Journal, the percentage of employers using personality testing as a pre-hire assessment
has increased from 26% to 57% (Webber, 2016). There are many reasons why personality tests are used.
Firstly, employers believe that personality tests will accelerate the selection process and filter out potential
candidates with unbecoming traits. For instance, it is good to know that a job applicant is strong-willed and
determined when hiring a security guard to work in a college. The same applies to the service sector. For the same
reason, a sales representative is the face of a company whose ability to sell and persuade reflects on a company
reputation. Considering the constantly increasing supply of labor, employers raise the hiring bar by eliminating any
possibility of a bad hire and enforcing personality tests on job applicants (Lee, 1975). Lee’s research produced in
1975 when personality testing was only gathering momentum still holds true today. Therefore, managers do their
best to predict employee inclinations by utilizing aptitude and personality testing in order to reduce undesirable
behavior in the workplace.
Secondly, the return on investment of hiring is crucial to HR managers and companies, and a bad return on a hire
results in a significantly reduced bottom line. That is why employers make sure that employees are competent

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enough in terms of mental capacity and temperament to perform assigned duties well. Moreover, it is costly to
replace a bad hire. Many additional costs of replacing an employee such as interviewing and processing burden a
company with hefty expenses. For instance, half of medium-sized American businesses admit that a bad hire in the
last year has cost them more than $30,000 in total (Hsieh, 2014). In addition, employers are vicariously liable for
their employees meaning that big bosses do not want to incur any legal costs and repercussions or be held
responsible for employee violence, ogling, harassing, and blunders (Millard, 2016). Similarly, employers use
personality testing because of a strong disbelief in reference checks. Employers rarely reveal negative aspects of
employee tenure and are reluctant to giving an honest appraisal of an employee performance. On the contrary, they
tend to embellish their subordinates’ achievements upon employee requests (Adler, 1996). Hence, employers strive
to reduce the cost of bad decision-making when it comes to hiring.
Finally, the personality testing businesses amount to a $500 million industry that grows at an exponential 10% per
year (Smith, 2016). Personality test developers spend a considerable fraction of their expenses on marketing to reach
out to HR managers. Some companies do not operate at the highest level of operational and ethical standards (Conte,
2014). Deceptive marketing and false advertising are used to sway employers towards purchasing their personality
tests to identify crude talent at the early stages of hiring, supposedly saving tremendous amount of money (Smith,
2016). The barriers to entry and exit of the personality testing entry are negligible which makes it attractive for
unscrupulous competitors to obscure employers’ gullible minds. In 2016 alone, 400 brand-new personality tests
have been coined and released on the market (Schultz, 2016). The new tests are trendy and popular with employers
who fall for developers’ advertising and promote it by word of mouth. Ultimately, personality tests programmers
who positively portray their products on the market and vouch for their quality without substantiating it with
sufficient research lure employers into using personality tests in the workplace (Van der Zee, 2001).
Are there any benefits of personality testing in the workplace?
After discussing why employers use personality tests, let us move on to what benefits personality tests have for
businesses, employers, and employees. While there is excessive evidence against using personality testing in the
hiring process, there are some benefits to consider (Schultz, 2016).
Taken before an interview, personality test results can help an interviewer narrow down the scope of questions to
ask an interviewee and pay attention to certain aspects of their personality more than others. As shown by Conte,
some favorable personality traits such as extraversion, agreeableness are purportedly linked with predicting job
performance which might increase a chance of making a right bet when it comes to promotion to a leadership
position (Conte, 2014). Explicit communication of what kind of personality employers look for in personality tests
improves company culture because people of similar level of introversion and extraversion, leadership skills, and
soft skills are hired (Trainor, 2002). Workers who have similar traits tend to stay longer which leads to lower staff
turnover (Bregman, 2015). In team-oriented companies where collective accountability is promulgated, it is easier to
form high-performing teams when employers understand the personalities of team members. Moreover, employees

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can get a better overall picture of a company that they apply to if they know what the company culture is like, and
what kind of predispositions HR managers prefer their workers to have. In addition, employers tend to be less
prejudiced towards minorities when they have a laid-out map of their performance and personality traits (Wihler,
2016). Overall, personality testing in the hiring process benefits both employees and employers in terms of
performance prediction, company culture enhancement, and bias elimination (Conte, 2014).
What are possible concerns and dangers of personality testing as a hiring tool?
There are numerous issues regarding personality testing that need to be taken into consideration before applying it in
the hiring process. According to Harvard Business Review, personality tests were designed for various purposes and
hiring was not one of them; hence, its application in the workplace is dubious. For instance, widely used The Myers-
Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was initially practiced in educational and psychotherapeutic settings as well as in the
private sector such as the military and the US government (Bregman, 2015). While it is not outlawed to conduct
personality testing, employees should be aware of potential discrimination against minorities, the invasion of
privacy, and low reliability and validity of personality tests.
Firstly, the use of personality testing in the hiring process gives rise to an examination of possible seeds of
discrimination against many groups of minorities. Unexpectedly, whereas the very purpose of personality tests is to
deviate from a common misconception that the world favors “white middle-class males”, many argue that
personality tests are one-sided towards them and biased against people of color (Herman, 2014). A first group put at
a disadvantage that comes to mind is the mentally ill who are protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act
(“ADA”) (Stabile, 2001). Since their personalities may not be stable, people with temporary mental disabilities such
as depression or a mild case of bipolar disorder may fail a personality test while having what it takes for the job. It
leads to screening out of such employees because they bear unbecoming traits that do not align with a company
vision (Weber, 2014). Potential employees with physical disabilities may fall victim to discrimination as well
(Hoffman, 2010). For instance, such people cannot truthfully answer certain questions such as “I use every minute
of my life efficiently” because of certain impediments that prevent them from managing their time as efficiently as
healthy people do. These kinds of questions draw out impertinent mental deviations and physical disabilities of job
applicants and infringe on their privacy. Moreover, some studies suggest that frequently personality tests are
culturally biased and discriminatory against certain ethnicities and nations (Butcher, 2000). For instance, the
American Civil Liberties Union found that the creators of the notorious Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI) – test that is widely used in the workplace – used a research sample before the test rollout that
was "composed essentially of white, rural subjects from Minnesota”, leaving out many people of other ethnicities,
religions, and ages (Herman, 2014). Ultimately, the administration of personality tests in the hiring process brings
up some controversies as regards possible discrimination based on race, religion, age, and mental and physical
abilities of job applicants.

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Secondly, personality testing in the workplace may lead to the infringement on human privacy. Job applicants are
made to divulge their personal information that they may not want to share including such sensitive aspects as
personal views on religion, political associations, certain behavioral patterns, and psychological inclinations (Grant,
2013). Therefore, potential employee privacy is violated by definition because personal privacy is “freedom from
damaging publicity, public scrutiny, secret surveillance, or unauthorized disclosure of one's personal data or
information, as by a government, corporation, or individual” (Parker, 1973). Since psychologists have no legal
immunity like lawyers, they are under no obligation to withhold personality test results. Consequently, test results
reach the public domain. Many unsuspecting nonprofessionals who assume personality testing to be confidential and
unwarily apply for a job are unaware of the fact that their test results may become publicly available (Yamamoto,
1966).
Lastly, validity and reliability of personality test have been challenged by numerous research and studies. From a
scientific standpoint, three categories need to be taken into account to identify the practicality of personality tests’
application in the hiring process: Comprehension, validity, and reliability. As for personality tests’ comprehension, a
vast majority of widespread personality tests do not include all personality traits that employers might be interested
in. For instance, besides the fact that MBTI was not invented for hiring, it typecasts people into 16 personality
categories. They give nebulous and general personality descriptions that can be applicable to millions (Brown,
2015). Personality tests have not been proved reliable as well according to many studies. In a recent article, Roman
Krznaric states that “if you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there’s around a 50 percent chance that you
will fall into a different personality category” (Grant, 2013). Moreover, the “test-retest” indicator is staggeringly low
since more than 50% of personality test takers report different results after five weeks of test administration
(Schuerger, 2016). Out of sheer curiosity, I took MBTI seven weeks ago and then retook it one week ago, answering
all the questions candidly. It turned out that my introverted personality was gone and I transformed into an
optimistic extrovert. Along with the reliability, the validity of personality tests is brought into question as well.
According to Martin, the validity of the personality test application to predict performance reaches the maximum of
0.22 out of 1 which is akin to the validity of fortune-telling and mind-reading (Martin, 2014). Some other
researchers compare the validity of personality tests to that of horoscopes’ and palm reading’s (Grant, 2013). Here is
a case in point from a famed psychologist Donna Flagg: “I am a trained dancer. And while I could take a test and
answer all kinds of questions about how to dance, my results would not even come close to elucidating whether or
not I actually can dance” (Flagg, 2016). The validity is also doubted since personality tests are easy to fake to fit in a
company culture and purport to have desired personality traits. The most important reason that employers have for
using personality tests is the supposed ability to predict job performance. However, after examining a sample of five
hundred employees in multiple industries, Dwoskin concluded, “few consistent relationships between personality
type and managerial effectiveness have been found.” (Dwoskin, 2014).

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What are other hiring tools and alternatives to personality tests to improve recruitment effectiveness?
According to numerous researchers and business leaders there are many ways to modify the hiring process and
improve on the personality test usage to predict performance. For instance, Rynes’s research in which 1,000
members from different HR societies were surveyed with an average of 14 years of work experience established that
HR managers tend to value personality traits more than employee skillset when it comes to hiring. For instance, 84%
said, “Companies that screen for values have better job performance than those that screen for intelligence” and 82%
said, “Conscientiousness is a better job predictor than intelligence”) (Rynes, 2002). It is evident that the hiring
process is skewed towards employee personality traits rather than their qualifications, and there is a need for more
effective hiring selection practices. Hence, I will put myself in the place of a hiring manager and devise my own
assessment strategy to screen candidates.
If I happened to be an HR manager in a multinational company with thousands of employees wherein the cost of
making a bad hiring decision is too high, I would transform the hiring process in a way that entails not just
personality tests but a large assortment of combined hiring tools that can measurably affect the impact on the
company bottom line. According to Martin’s research, the integration of all relevant aspects of both employee
personality traits and skillset leads to the highest performance predictive ability. Martin goes on to explain that the
validity and reliability of using multi-measure tests is 0.71+ compared to using personality tests alone whose
identical indicators do not exceed 0.21 (Martin, 2014). To achieve such a high validity of hiring assessments, I
would fuse cognitive ability tests (aptitude and intelligence tests to measure IQ, EQ, quantitative and qualitative
skills), integrity/honesty tests, reference checks, personality tests, and work experience into one process of candidate
screening. Since personality tests are the pivotal topic of this research paper, I would namely use The Caliper Profile
(identifies what really drives a person) or Gallup Strengths Finder (measures indicators of success in candidates)
because they exhibit strong assessable attributes as opposed to, for instance, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The quantifiable characteristics that the two aforementioned tests
have in common include but not limited to 1) lie-detecting questions that vet test-takers’ integrity and reduce the
chance of faking answers, 2) the high reliability when it comes to the test-retest indicator, and 3) “measurable stable
traits that will not tend to change once the candidate has been on the job for some length of time” (e.g. competence,
self-discipline, values, trust) (Chatterjee, 2015). Consequently, I would take a holistic approach based on an overall
picture of an applicant’s result of the aforementioned. Additionally, since only 14% of organizations monitor their
assessment strategies, I would keep track of the assessment records to gauge the success of both my hiring strategies
and the candidates’ performance (Bregman, 2015).
Conclusion and findings
This paper has made substantial suggestions on how to improve the process of personality testing in the workplace.
The interests of both employers (help them increase the chances of a successful hire) and employees (assessment

8. The Use of Personality Testing as a Hiring Tool: Why is it Still a Thing?
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strategies that equally uphold their qualifications as well as their personality traits, reducing the potential for abuse
by employees) were taken into account to equitably design the assessment strategy (Stabile, 2001).
Ultimately, it is understandable why employers increasingly make hiring decisions based on personality test results
in the globally competitive workplace. However, the sole application of personality tests in the workplace in the first
rounds of CV screening is a weak indicator of employee performance and leadership skills because it inevitably
results in hiring unskilled candidates and weeding out skilled ones. Moreover, it is discriminatory against certain job
applicants and potentially threatening to the privacy of all applicants.

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