Talent Assessment FAQ

Personality tests are inventories used to measure someone's personality characteristics. This can determine a person's ability to successfully interact with others, achieve goals, and solve problems, among other things.

Personality tests can help HR professionals and managers make selection, promotion, coaching, and developmental decisions. They can be used to screen out less desirable job candidates and to identify those with more desirable characteristics.

Personality tests can predict employee productivity, absenteeism, leadership, and unsafe work behaviors, which can help reduce turnover rates, lower training costs, and increase productivity.

Personality is measured by having a person respond to a series of statements written to identify specific personality traits. Unlike cognitive ability tests, there are no correct answers; test items are merely statements in which a person identifies how accurately a statement represents his or her personality.

Most personality tests use the five-factor model of personality as a foundation. The five-factor model suggests that we generally think about and describe one another using five broad themes—conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences.

Yes. Analyses of research repeatedly have shown the validity—the ability of a test to measure what it is intended to test—of personality tests for predicting all aspects of job performance. Personality tests can predict the quality and quantity of individual work performance, teamwork, leadership, turnover, absenteeism, counterproductive work behaviors, helping behaviors, quality of communication, job knowledge, and work safety behaviors.

The Talent Assessment is primarily based on facets of the five-factor model of personality, as well as concepts from emotional intelligence literature, both of which have been associated with work-related behavior. For more information, see "What the Talent Assessment Measures."