Pre-Employment Personality Tests

Learn how personality tests help you identify the right people for the job and your workplace.

Hire Success custom pre-employment testing

What is the purpose of personality testing for employment?

A pre-employment personality test is an assessment of job candidates that helps you determine whether their personality fits the job. For instance, using a professionally developed work personality test can help you identify whether a candidate is introverted or extroverted, patient or impatient, etc.

Say you need to hire for an accounting job. You’ll want to have candidates take an aptitude test to make sure they know what they claim they know. But it’s equally important to find a specific type of person — such as someone who’s detail-oriented — who is more likely to succeed in that role. You can use personality tests for hiring to help you spot character traits you’ve identified as being important for a particular job.

How personality tests work and what they measure

Employers use workplace personality tests to assess important character traits, motivations, preferences, and behaviors of job candidates to see whether their personality type is a match for a specific position. The tests are most commonly administered as a questionnaire where a candidate chooses answers that best describe how they would feel in various scenarios.

By quantifying personality as measurements along established scales, analysis becomes more objective and reliable. With personality tests for employment, employers can create benchmarks to better focus their hiring campaigns. And candidates can be more easily compared against one another.

Hiring managers may want their work personality tests to measure any or all of the following:

Teamwork skills. Does your candidate prefer working in a group or independently? How do they process feedback?
Work style. How does your candidate handle work tasks? How do they handle stress? What’s their tolerance for risk?
Workplace flexibility. Is your candidate flexible and adaptable, or are they resistant to change in their work environment.
Culture fit. Personality testing before hiring can reveal whether a candidate is aligned with your values.
Work ethic. Is your candidate reliable? Are they dedicated to doing their best at all times? Will they be accountable?
Soft skills. How well an employee can listen, communicate, or empathize with others is critical to their success and growth.
Personal traits. Is your candidate an introvert or an extrovert? How confident are they? Are they persuasive? Persuadable?
Management style. How patient or tolerant is your candidate? Are they passive or aggressive?

Benefits of pre-employment personality tests

Personality tests paint a detailed picture of your candidates and give you the tools to turn that analysis into actionable hiring steps. The many advantages of pre-employment personality assessments include:

sorting through job applicants with personality testing

Reduced employee turnover and expenses. With employee personality testing, you can identify key traits in your best employees and hire people with known "success factors" to improve job satisfaction and minimize turnover.
Shorter time-to-hire and reduced costs. Work personality tests make it easier to identify top candidates quickly, speeding up your pipeline, optimizing the amount of time dedicated to interviews, and reducing hiring costs.

improved workplace productivity from pre-employment personality tests

More consistency and reduced bias in hiring. Employee personality tests provide a reliable, consistent way of evaluating each applicant before you conduct interviews.
More effective job training. In-depth knowledge of job candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they learn, can be used to select and administer necessary employee training.
Improved workplace relationships. Personality tests allow you to discover employees’ hidden talents and skills, and make sure they’re given the chance to use them. Plus, you'll be able to better manage your team members.

The first thing we did was test our employees to develop a baseline that characterized the unique traits of our best employees. We test all of our potential candidates using the baseline information we developed. As a result, I now know what I am looking for in a candidate and the Hire Success^® System has given us a tool that has helped us a lot in this area.
- R. HEDEEN VAN AUSDALL FARRAR

Hire Success^® vs. other personality tests

The Hire Success^® Personality Profile is the most advanced work personality testing tool on the market, helping hiring managers to make better decisions since 1997. It not only identifies candidates’ personality traits but also teases out the nuances within those traits. It even suggests job interview questions tailored to each candidate — along with the answers you should receive. Decision-making gets quicker and easier, saving time and money.

And more than any other personality test for employment, the Hire Success^® Personality Profile gives you the data-backed confidence you need to conduct structured, objective, in-depth job interviews that lead to better hiring decisions. You’ll have peace of mind in knowing that you’re selecting the right person for the job.

Compared to others, the Hire Success^® personality tests are: