Personality Profiling for Recruitment

Chris Apps • 27 June 2024

The Power of Personality Assessments in Hiring

The Employee Personality Profile (EPP), from Criteria, is a workplace personality assessment based on the “Big Five”. The research into personality over the past four decades has overwhelmingly supported a model of normal personality referred to as the “Five-Factor Model of Personality” or sometimes called the “Big Five”, thus, any reliable and valid personality profile should be based on the “Big Five”.


The EPP measures 12 personality traits and provides valuable insights into an individual’s work styles as well as how likely they are to interact positively with co-workers, managers, and customers.


It can be used as an evaluation or selection tool for virtually any job as it contains benchmarks specific to unique job families, allowing you to compare an individual’s scores against composite profiles to determine their likely job fit.


The EPP contains 140 items, takes about 10 minutes to complete, and measures 12 different traits: Achievement, Assertiveness, Competitiveness, Conscientiousness, Cooperativeness, Extroversion, Managerial, Motivation, Openness, Patience, Self-Confidence, and Stress Tolerance.


There are no correct or incorrect answers on the EPP. All the candidate’s responses come together to create a unique personality profile for that individual. Similarly, there are no “good” or “bad” traits - some traits and profiles are simply more associated with success for particular roles.


The EPP is device-agnostic. This means candidates can take the test on any digital device they choose – a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop – in any location and at any time.


The EPP has been extensively validated, demonstrating that the test is highly predictive of job performance for a wide variety of jobs. It has been validated for both construct and predictive validity. EPP results are statistically reliable, meaning that the test measures traits that are generally stable across an individual’s life.


We have been using the EPP from Criteria Corp for just over 3 years and we are pleased with the results, as are our clients.


Fermion specialises in psychometric testing for recruitment. Please contact Fermion to discuss how the EPP, or any other psychometric test, can help with you your recruitment decisions.


About the Author:

Christopher Apps is an Organisational Psychologist and the owner of Fermion. He stays updated on the latest psychology research and shares evidence-based insights.


The focus of Fermion is "Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and "Recruitment to Retention: How to select good staff and keep them". If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please feel free to contact us at Fermion.


“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Eleanor Roosevelt.

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