How to Use The Top 6 Personality Tests For Hiring (2023)

As you begin to grow and expand your business, the use of personality tests or assessments will be a vital tool to ensure you have the ‘right’ people in the ‘right’ seats of your business.

These personality tests allow you to make better decisions about who to hire into which roles and enables you to have long-term growth with that hire.

But before, you can begin to implement these personalities tests in your hiring process or workplace, you will need to do two things:

1. Be sure you’ve also taken all of the tests yourself.
2. Understand what type of results and information are most important to you.

You don’t need to utilize ALL of the tests in your hiring process or business. But, you need to implement the RIGHT ones for your business.

It’s not about finding out what’s ‘wrong’ with someone, IT IS about understanding each individual so they can work in their own unique way, capitalizing on that person’s strengths to better your business and your life.

In the online business space, these personality tests and assessments are allowing visionaries to create dynamic virtual teams. When we are crafting a team, understanding each team member’s results can help increase their output. This is because we are able to ensure we are giving each team member the chance for optimal success.

Personality tests & assessments in building teams allow us to:

• Hire the right fit
• Boost productivity management tools
• Create dynamic teams
• Leverage success systems
• Improve the quality of work
• Streamline operations
• Instill engagement in their role

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.

And, although, there are not any studies on the numbers of online businesses that are using personality tests and assessments, I will say that, more often than not, most of these online business owners and their hiring managers are asking this question in their applications.

There are 6 TOP Personality Tests that I Recommend for Hiring:

1. Kolbe-A
2. Enneagram
3. DiSC
4. Myers-Briggs
5. 16 personalities
6. Stregthsfinders

Kolbe-A Assessment for Hiring Your Perfect Team

The Kolbe-A test measures, in simple terms, “how you work”. It measures your unique natural instincts so that you can capitalize on your strengths and your potential. Even though we are covering under ‘personality tests’ it is not a personality test.

The Kolbe-A is mostly used to understand how a person will conceptualize a problem, solve it and their tendencies to follow through on that situation.

The Kolbe-A test only has 36 questions, with two responses for each question – MOST and LEAST. It will measure how you operate in 4 categories.

• Fact Finder – how you deal with data gathering
• Follow Thru – how you act, getting organized ideas and store information
• Quick Start – how you deal with business risk examples and unknown
• Implementer – how you handle things literally from the abstract to the concrete

Enneagram In Business – Knowing Your Magic Number

This is probably one of the most common personality tests that you hear people mentioning. “What’s your number”. Overall this is one of the most common questions in an online business job application.

Although, typically, this number will never disqualify anyone from being hired into a team, because of their number. It does help to ensure that we are not stacking a team with the same “number”. For instance, we don’t want too many 3’s on a team.

The Enneagram breaks down into nine categories that then have wings for each (which is another type that influences your dominant type.)

• Type ONE: The Perfectionist.
• Type TWO: The Helper.
• Type THREE: The Performer.
• Type FOUR: The Romantic.
• Type FIVE: The Investigator.
• Type SIX: The Loyalist.
• Type SEVEN: The Enthusiast.
• Type EIGHT: The Challenger.
• Type NINE: The Peacemaker.

The book, “The Road Back To You” by Ian Morgan Cron & Suzanne Stabile is incredibly helpful when learning about the enneagram and architecting a team based on everyone’s’ magic number.

DiSC Personality Assessments To Improve team Dynamics

The goal of the DiSC personality test is a personality assessment scoring the four dimensions of behavior to improve productivity, communication, teamwork and most importantly predict job fit.

DiSC profiles help you decipher the personality types of each candidate so you can get a clear, upfront idea of how they’ll jive with your current teammates.

Sharing DiSC profiles with one another helps each team member understand:

• How they respond to conflict and solve problems
• What motivates them or stresses them out
• How to work better as a team by avoiding conflict and improving communication
• How to shape sales pitches and customer service to different customer personality types

Myers-Briggs Assessments For Understanding the Depth of Your Candidates

If you ever took a high school or university psychology class, you probably took this test and were matched with a four-letter personality type. (Any fellow ISFJ’s out there?)

The Myers-Briggs test features 93 questions with only two answers to choose from. Your response determines which tendencies you lean towards out of the following categories:

• Extrovert (E) or Introvert (I)
• Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)
• Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

The Myers-Briggs test is not a test I would suggest using alone in your hiring process because there is no ranking or scoring of the results. These results are not scaled and cannot be easily compared between candidates.

Instead, the test could potentially be a good indicator of how a candidate will work in a group—but the result still shouldn’t be a deciding factor.

16 Personalities Assessment to Understand Decision-Making Capabilities

The 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire, also known as the 16PF, measures 16 personality factors on a scale in order to help predict one’s work performance and behavior. The test was designed to help employers predict things like how much a candidate relates to others, their level of independence, thinking style, flexibility, and ability to manage stress.

The framework gives people new ways of understanding themselves. There are four general groups of personalities – each personality falls into one of these four groups:

• Analysts
• Diplomats
• Sentinels
• Explorers

16 personalities is a personality framework that provides insight into how a person makes decisions, interacts with other people, and processes information. While it reveals personality traits, the 16PF is an overall better indicator of job performance when compared with tests like the Myers-Briggs Indicator.

CliftonStrengthsFinders For Building A Well-Rounded Team

CliftonStrengthsFinders (formerly Stregthsfinders) is a tool that can help identify your candidates decision-making process and unique perspective.

The test consists of a series of 177 questions in which you rate yourself based on which of two statements describes you most accurately. Results are placed into four domains:

• Executing
• Influencing
• Relationship Building
• Strategic Thinking

One great way to tell if your businesses group dynamics ae in balance is by looking at their StrengthsFinder results. If the entire group has talents in just one or two Leadership Domain (such as Executing and Relationship Building), then the other domains are likely to be weaker.

With an absence of strengths in all four domains, your business could experience unhealthy growth.

Great leaders scale their business with a servant’s heart and learn the communication styles of each employee.

BEWARE — no personality test is a “silver bullet.”

All of these personality tests can help you get more in-depth information about the characteristics of your applicants BUT — don’t let the test be a disqualifier, use it to see who will align best with you as a person, and with your business. It is not a barometer that can tell you whether or not to hire or eliminate someone based on the results alone.

Bottom-line: these personality tests should add value to the hiring process, but it shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

Ready to scale your business and create a holistic hiring plan for your business, I’d love to join your team and create your team growth plan for your business. Let’s connect on a free Clarity Call.

PS: Whenever you are ready… Here’s how we can support you:

1. Schedule a Clarity Call to find out how we can join forces in a dynamic Visionary + Integrator Duo.
2. The Launch Intensive, where your project plan is literally designed for you and customized to help you meet your launch goals every time.
3. A Done-for-You Hiring Plan that alleviates you from having to figure it all out yourself. You’ll receive the exact hiring handbook, templates and swipe files customized to your business and your next hire(s).
4. Your 1:1 Ops Intensive will provide you with clarity, strategic guidance and your roadmap for the next 3-12 months all delivered in a customized project management board to ensure your projects and team stay on track.

Looking for something else?

Try out our 90 Day Blueprint, The Launch Playbook Mini-Course, or the Idea to Profits Framework, The Systems to Scale Workbook, The Hiring Planner.

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