Let’s start with the easy use case: Personality tests as a way to understand your co-workers better. In pretty much any work environment where workers are required to collaborate and work closely with one another, this seems like a no-brainer. These tests can be reductive but better versions will focus on finding the nuances of attitudes and behaviors at work. While I won’t make any personal recommendations on which one to use, we use Birkman here at The Starr Conspiracy with generally decent results. Others, including MBTI, can work fine too. 

It’s hard to bridge the digital divide, and while people can work together fine remotely on an indefinite basis, I believe in-person moments matter. Adding context to those relationships in between those touchpoints could be one way personality assessments could be uniquely impactful in this weird world of work. 

What I am much more skeptical of is using a personality test in any sort of impactful workplace decision, whether it’s about hiring, promotions, development, or dismissals. I will argue that you should be at least a little cautious, too. 

First, it’s hard to evaluate the claims of vendors selling these assessments. Plum, one of the providers mentioned in the Times article, seems very well thought out and they promise to improve diversity with their approach. They seem to be intent on succeeding where others have failed by actively avoiding the sort of decisions that leave a workforce full of similar people. 

That’s good! But Plum isn’t going to help if it turns out that its assessments had an adverse impact on our workforce for critical staffing decisions. Ultimately, organizations are responsible for vetting how they evaluate talent. Needing both a lawyer and I/O psychologist to look at these programs would be prudent.

It doesn’t give me warm fuzzies that many of the examples used in the Times piece shared that people’s careers were used as test subjects for some of these assessments. Ultimately, you should have confidence in an assessment before deploying it and doing an uncontrolled A/B test doesn’t seem like good methodology or right. 

While I may come off as a skeptic, we should also take this in the context of the other factors that drive employment decisions. In a world that hopes to use methods that are predictive of success at work, are personality tests any worse than unstructured interviews, nepotism, or whether you just really like someone because you drank a few beers with them at a Mexican restaurant near DFW airport? Probably not.  

But personality assessments must be properly balanced with other factors, hopefully some that reliably evaluate skills and competencies needed for the position. If the results of an assessment tips the scales to another employee or candidate, you better make sure you’re on solid footing before making the decision.