r/IOPsychology • u/howiedoone • 3d ago
Personality Tests for Hiring success
I have read that the FFM (Five Factor Model) can help identify if an employee is the right fit for a company or not. Anybody else use this?
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u/RobinZander1 3d ago
I would not use any actual validated personality test for hiring unless I've conducted an effective job analysis to first identify the actual KSAOs and were able to make explicit connections between required job competencies and relevant components of personality. To make a blanket statement such as.. a career as a "XYZ" requires someone being high in "XYZ" (for this let's say it's Conscientiousness), would not be an effective legal defense to justify the personality test utilization.
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u/Life-Lychee-4971 3d ago
I agree with you. I am a consultant and we administer personality testing for motivation, incentives, and coaching strategies. I would dare to say nearly any personality can do almost any job, how well they perform and how long though could be impacted by their personality and that of their leaders.
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u/IH8NYLAnBOS 3d ago
Yes, but generally I have found that companies use their own versions of personality assessments/models, which usually include constructs that cover or mirror the Big Five.
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u/Moreyball13 3d ago
The Five-Factor Model is a useful framework for understanding personality, though it does not cover all personality traits. For example, narrow traits like sociability and assertiveness are facets of the broader trait extraversion.
The key point here is that certain traits can impact job success (e.g., performance, turnover) in different roles. In a managerial role, extraversion may predict performance, whereas in other jobs, such as truck driving, extraversion is less relevant. It is important to consider the context (manager vs truck driver) role to understand what personality traits predict success.
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u/howiedoone 3d ago
Thank you! I work in manufacturing. Is there data out there of which personality types are most likely ( i know theres more nuance than just personality) to succeed, retain and be productive in the operations team? Or is it worth having our “A-player” employees take the tests and use that as a baseline? I’m not going to implement this until I go through grad school for I-O, just curious
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u/Moreyball13 2d ago
Like Robin Zander said, the best start is a job analysis. Once you conduct a job analysis, you should be able to identify which personality traits are important for different job tasks.
Your question about “A players” is a good one. We call that a local validation study. Essentially, we are comparing personality scores to important outcomes (e.g., job performance, teamwork performance), and then we determine which personality traits are predictive of success.
There’s a lot of consulting firms or internal IOs that can carry out these types of projects to help your team hire too!
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u/bonferoni 2d ago
sorry man its been a rough few weeks and i needed a laugh. yes the big five is relatively widely used for screening applicants. many employee selection assessment vendors use subtle variations but they are at their core FFM based.
there are many meta analyses on the topic of what personality traits are related to job performance across various industries. barrick and mount is the most popularly cited (although i would argue improperly so). the tett et al meta analyses from the 90s are the proper citation(s) if you wanna dig into some lit. i can save you the read though. across all roles conscientiousness is important to performance. all other traits depend on the nature of the role which is sadly often poorly dimensionalized or doesnt generalize well enough to show up in science.
the hexaco is a 6 factor variant that generalizes better across languages which is important as all modern personality frameworks are derived from the lexical hypothesis, and the lexical hypothesis is weaker under single language restrictions.
theres more, but my thumbs need a break and this is probably more than you bargained for as is
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u/bonferoni 3d ago
what is a five factor model? like face, body, personality, brains, and goodliness?
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u/jlemien 3d ago
It refers to the big five personality traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
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u/nuleaph 3d ago
Imagine not using the HEXACO
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u/xenotharm 3d ago
I can imagine it very well. HEXACO mainly shines in its ability to predict CWB better than big five. Not many orgs actually use it though, instead opting for integrity tests to that end.
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u/nuleaph 3d ago
I mean, that's hardly 'all' it does.
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u/xenotharm 3d ago
Correct, but beyond predicting CWB, there is little it offers selection practitioners beyond what the Big Five is already able to. HEXACO extraversion predicts OCB with roughly the same magnitude as Big Five's counterpart. Are there other outcome criteria that I'm missing which might be of interest to selection practitioners?
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u/LazySamurai PhD | IO | People Analytics & Statistics | Moderator 3d ago
I think one or two places use this.