7 Evidence-Based Inventories, Scales, and Tests
Personality assessments can be used in the workplace during recruitment to gauge whether someone would be a good fit for a job or organization and to help determine job performance, career progression, and development.
Below, we highlight a few commonly used inventories and tests for such career assessments.
1. The Hogan personality inventory (HPI)
The Hogan personality inventory (Hogan & Hogan, 2002) is a self-report personality assessment created by Robert Hogan and Joyce Hogan in the late 1970s.
It was originally based on the California Personality Inventory (Gough, 1975) and also draws upon the five-factor model of personality. The five-factor model of personality suggests there are five key dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Digman, 1990).
The Hogan assessment comprises 206 items across seven different scales that measure and predict social behavior and social outcomes rather than traits or qualities, as do other popular personality measures.
These seven scales include:
- Adjustment
- Ambition
- Sociability
- Interpersonal sensitivity
- Prudence
- Inquisitiveness
- Learning approach
The HPI’s primary use is within organizations to help with recruitment and the development of leaders. It is a robust scale with over 40 years of evidence to support it, and the scale itself takes roughly 15–20 minutes to complete (Hogan Assessments, n.d.).
2. DISC test
The DISC test of personality developed by Merenda and Clarke (1965) is a very popular personality self-assessment used primarily within the corporate world. It is based on the emotional and behavioral DISC theory (Marston, 1928), which measures individuals on four dimensions of behavior:
- Dominance
- Inducement
- Submission
- Compliance
The self-report comprises 24 questions and takes roughly 10 minutes to complete. While the test is simpler and quicker to complete than other popular tests (e.g., the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), it has been subject to criticism regarding its psychometric properties.
3. Gallup – CliftonStrengths™ Assessment
Unlike the DISC test, the CliftonStrengths™ assessment, employed by Gallup and based on the work of Marcus Buckingham and Don Clifton (2001), is a questionnaire designed specifically to help individuals identify strengths in the workplace and learn how to use them.
The assessment is a self-report Likert scale comprising 177 questions and takes roughly 30 minutes to complete. Once scored, the assessment provides individuals with 34 strength themes organized into four key domains:
- Strategic thinking
- Executing
- Influencing
- Relationship building
The scale has a solid theoretical and empirical grounding, making it a popular workplace assessment around the world.
4. NEO-PI-R
The NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 2008) is a highly popular self-report personality assessment based on Allport and Odbert’s (1936) trait theory of personality.
With good reliability, this scale has amassed a large evidence base, making it an appealing inventory for many. The NEO-PI-R assesses an individual’s strengths, talents, and weaknesses and is often used by employers to identify suitable candidates for job openings.
It uses the big five factors of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and also includes an additional six subcategories within the big five, providing a detailed breakdown of each personality dimension.
The scale itself comprises 240 questions that describe different behaviors and takes roughly 30–40 minutes to complete. Interestingly, this inventory can be administered as a self-report or, alternatively, as an observational report, making it a favored assessment among professionals.
5. Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)
The EPQ is a personality assessment developed by personality psychologists Hans Eysenck and Sybil Eysenck (1975).
The scale results from successive revisions and improvements of earlier scales: the Maudsley Personality Inventory (Eysenck 1959) and Eysenck Personality Inventory (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1964).
The aim of the EPQ is to measure the three dimensions of personality as espoused by Eysenck’s psychoticism–extraversion–neuroticism theory of personality The scale itself uses a Likert format and was revised and shortened in 1992 to include 48 items (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1992).
This is a generally useful scale; however, some researchers have found that there are reliability issues with the psychoticism subscale, likely because this was a later addition to the scale.
6. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
The MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) is one of the most widely used personality inventories in the world and uses a true/false format of questioning.
It was initially designed to assess mental health problems in clinical settings during the 1940s and uses 10 clinical subscales to assess different psychological conditions.
The inventory was revised in the 1980s, resulting in the MMPI-2, which comprised 567 questions, and again in 2020, resulting in the MMPI-3, which comprises a streamlined 338 questions.
While the revised MMPI-3 takes a lengthy 35–50 minutes to complete, it remains popular to this day, particularly in clinical settings, and enables the accurate capture of aspects of psychopathy and mental health disturbance. The test has good reliability but must be administered by a professional.
7. 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF)
The 16PF (Cattell et al., 1970) is another rating scale inventory used primarily in clinical settings to identify psychiatric disorders by measuring “normal” personality traits.
Cattell identified 16 primary personality traits, with five secondary or global traits underneath that map onto the big five factors of personality.
These include such traits as warmth, reasoning, and emotional stability, to name a few. The most recent version of the questionnaire (the fifth edition) comprises 185 multiple-choice questions that ask about routine behaviors on a 10-point scale and takes roughly 35–50 minutes to complete.
The scale is easy to administer and well validated but must be administered by a professional.
What our readers think
Very insightful yet easy to read article, thank you for sharing!
Have you heard of the Strength Finder test from Personality Quizzes? https://www.personality-quizzes.com/strength-finder
It’s a free version of Clifton Strengths (although you have to pay to see complete results).
I liked the experience, may be worth updating the list!
I learned so much. This article gave me more food for thought.