Why you should ask candidates to take the 16 Personalities test

Good recruiters know that hiring for only skills and experience isn’t enough. You must consider candidates’ core traits and attributes to get a complete picture of their suitability for a role. 

Otherwise, you could, for example, hire an experienced developer as a team lead, only to find out they lack empathy and prefer working alone. This kind of mis-hiring can lower productivity, damage team morale, and cost you time and money in re-hiring and replacing employees. 

The 16 Personalities test is an excellent tool for gathering insights about candidates’ traits, motivations, and preferences. Below, we explain why you should add this test to your hiring toolkit and how it can help improve candidate integration, development, and retention in your company.

What is the 16 Personalities test? 

The 16 Personalities test is a psychological assessment that categorizes individuals into 16 distinct personality types based on four key areas:

• Introvert (I) or Extrovert (E): This looks at individuals’ social preferences. Introverts prefer spending time alone, while extroverts gain energy from being around others. 

• Sensing (S) or Intuition (N): This describes how individuals make sense of the world. Sensing employees zoom into the concrete details, while intuitive employees look at the bigger picture and future possibilities.

• Thinking (T) or Feeling (F): This indicates how individuals make decisions. While Thinkers make decisions rooted in logic and facts, feelers consider people's emotions and values more.

• Judging (J) or Perceiving (P): This reveals how employees approach life and work. Those with a judging preference follow a planned and structured approach. Those with a perceiving preference tend to be more flexible and spontaneous.

Reducing the risk of mis-hires with the 16 Personalities test 

The 16 Personalities test reveals how candidates communicate, work, and make decisions – insights you can’t get from scanning resumes.

1. Improved job fit

Understanding your candidates’ personality types can help you evaluate their suitability for a specific role. 

For example, one study found that ESTJ, ENTJ, and ISTJ types were most prevalent among both managers and students who aspired to have a managerial career. 

This indicates that certain personality types may gravitate toward particular roles and have a better chance of succeeding in them. 

2. Better culture fit

The 16 Personalities test also tells you more about candidates’ social and communication preferences – both of which can determine how they’ll gel with their team and your company’s overall culture. 

For instance, imagine a tech startup that promotes a “fail fast” mentality, encouraging employees to innovate, embrace experimentation, and iterate quickly after failure. A candidate who prefers routine and structure or takes failure personally may struggle in the company. 

By knowing candidates’ qualities and preferences beforehand, the company’s hiring manager could have avoided mis-hiring or supported the employee in adapting their mindset through training or coaching. 

3. Aligned working practices 

Finally, certain personality types may better suit your company’s working practices than others. For example, a highly extroverted employee may not thrive in a fully remote job. 

Understanding this in advance can help you devise strategies to support them – for example, through regular check-ins or team socials. 

Building better teams through personality insights

Here’s how the 16 Personalities test can help you build and maintain well-rounded teams. 

1. Enhancing team composition

Harvard Business Review examined how individuals’ personality traits affect overall team performance. 

Results showed that teams with only pragmatic employees and no relationship-builders had poor cohesion. In contrast, teams focused entirely on relationship-building had high levels of harmony but poor task performance because employees didn’t challenge each other. A team with both personality types could have collaborated effectively and made better business decisions. 

This proves that understanding candidates’ personality traits can help you build teams with complementary skills, working styles, and interpersonal dynamics. 

You might, for instance, consider adding more detail-oriented candidates to teams that are heavy on big-picture thinking. Similarly, pairing feeling-type candidates with approachable and considerate managers can help them integrate seamlessly into their roles. 

Finally, not all jobs require perfectly balanced teams. For example, a quality check team may primarily need organized and methodical judging-type employees. You can factor this into your hiring decision and target candidates with this trait.

2. Fostering empathy and patience within teams 

Similarly, you can use the 16 Personalities test to ensure your existing employees and new hires understand each other’s differences and treat each other with respect, patience, and kindness.

For example, when everyone knows one another’s personality type, it can help organized personality types practice patience with new hires who prefer spontaneity.   

Likewise, those who enjoy social interactions and small talk might be less offended by their quiet, more direct peers if they understand it’s just a difference in communication styles. 

Enhancing employee development and retention

Additionally, you can use 16 Personalities test results to improve retention and create personalized development plans that harness candidates’ strengths. 

1. Personalized training and development 

The 16 Personalities test can help you devise tailored learning and development plans that maximize your new joiners’ potential. 

For instance, you may learn that your INTJ, or “Architect,” type candidates are excellent innovators but can come across as dismissive and arrogant with team members. Knowing this information, you can provide them with the right coaching and support to work through active listening, perspective-taking, and conflict management.  

2. Reduced turnover 

By ensuring better job fit, culture fit, and employee development, the 16 Personalities test can help increase job satisfaction and engagement. When employees are happier and more engaged at work, they’re less likely to quit – boosting your retention rates. 

Moreover, you can use test results to customize employee benefits for different personality types. For example, offering INFP, or “Mediator,” types with flexible working and volunteering time off could help to attract, engage, and retain them. 

Potential pitfalls to look out for

Watch out for these common pitfalls to ensure you use personality testing effectively and ethically. 

1. Over-reliance on personality in hiring

While personality tests provide some insight into job and culture fit, you can’t make hiring decisions based solely on candidates’ traits and at the expense of other critical factors such as skills, experience, and past performance. 

For example, even an employee with the perfect blend of influence and empathy can’t lead a team if they lack technical expertise and leadership experience.   

2. Candidate inauthenticity 

With the growing use of personality tests in hiring, some candidates might anticipate the role's needs and fake their answers on personality tests. You might notice potential mismatches between test results and an employee’s behaviors in real life.    

3. Biases and discrimination

There are risks that decision-makers will be prone to certain biases when using personality tests. For instance, an affinity bias might lead to a hiring manager favoring candidates whose traits and preferences are similar to their own rather than focusing on what’s needed for the role. 

Not only can biases like this lead to mis-hiring, but your company can also face legal and reputational risks for discrimination. 

Tips for implementing the 16 Personalities test at work

Keeping the above pitfalls in mind, here are some best practices to incorporate the 16 Personalities test in your hiring process. 

1. Use multi-measure testing

We recommend using personality tests alongside other talent assessments – like the ones TestGorilla provides. You can combine TestGorilla’s 16 Personalities test with its skills-based tests, cognitive ability tests, situational judgment tests, and more. Mix and match up to five in a single assessment for a custom evaluation.

This multi-measure testing approach helps to assess candidates thoroughly, giving you a complete picture of their suitability for a role, team, and your company overall.  

2. Verify traits through behavioral interviews

In addition to personality tests, put your candidates through behavioral interviews – either in-person or virtually – so you can verify their social, interpersonal, and other traits.

Furthermore, asking follow-up questions during these interviews lets you dig deeper into candidates’ past experiences – uncovering any discrepancies between their test responses and real-life behaviors. 

3. Provide bias awareness training to decision-makers

Put hiring managers, recruiters, and other decision-makers through bias awareness training so they can recognize and avoid potential biases that may arise when using personality tests in hiring. 

Improving workplace outcomes with TestGorilla’s 16 Personalities test

An accurate 16 Personalities test can help you make better hiring decisions, customize team compositions, and create personalized talent and development plans for your candidates and employees. However, you need to steer clear of over-relying on personality tests during hiring, as they’re prone to biases and even fake results. 

For a complete candidate evaluation, pair personality tests with other talent assessments like role-specific tests, cognitive ability assessments, and situational judgment tests – all of which you can find in TestGorilla’s extensive test library. 

To learn more, create a free account or schedule a live demo with a member of our team today.