Personality Profiling in the Workplace: How Common is It?

Figures vary on how common workplace personality profiling is, depending on where you look. We use the statistic provided by ere.com from their 2007 survey, which shows that over 65% of employers use “personality measures” as part of their employee screening and assessment toolkit.

We wondered if these figures pan out when asking jobseekers about their experience? So that’s just what we did - Over two and a half thousand replied, and here are the results;

Have you ever been asked to complete a psychometric test for work?

Yes, when applying for a job	779	31%
Yes, during a job interview	270	11%
Yes, as part of my job development plan	123	5%
Yes, for job training	55	2%
No, not within a work situation	1286	51%
Total	2513

Not quite the 65% of employees we might expect, but 49% is a high number nevertheless. Interesting, but not surprising, that training and development fell way short of recruitment. We certainly get more business from employers hiring new recruits than we do from those developing existing employees. Perhaps if more employers used profiling to help understand and develop existing staff, they’d need to use it far less for the recruitment of new starts - a question of false economies in play, methinks. And an opportunity for PeopleMaps to encourage more companies to invest in their existing employees.