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Myers-Briggs vs The Big Five: Should Employers Use Personality Tests?
Personality assessments are often presented as a shortcut to understanding how people work. But when a test can influence someone’s job prospects, how useful and how fair, is it?
Personality tests have a place in conversations about work. They can give people a shared language for discussing communication styles, preferences and potential areas for development. But there’s a big difference between using a test to start a conversation and using it to decide who gets hired, promoted or assigned to a role.
Two models often come up in workplace discussions: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Big Five. They both ask questions about personality, but they describe it differently and that matters when employers use the results.
What does the Myers-Briggs measure?
The MBTI groups people into 16 personality types using four pairs of preferences: extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. The result is a four-letter type, such as “INTJ” or “ESFP”.
People may find the framework useful for reflecting on how they prefer to take in information, make decisions or organise their work. In a team setting, discussing those preferences can prompt useful questions: How do we share information? How do we handle disagreements? What helps each of us do our best work?
The caution is that a four-letter label can look more definitive than it is. A person’s type doesn’t capture all their skills, experience, behaviour or potential and it shouldn’t be treated as a verdict on what work they can do.
In fact, the Myers & Briggs Foundation says using MBTI results to screen job applicants or decide job assignments is unethical. The assessment’s publisher also says it isn’t intended for hiring or for assigning people to roles or teams.
What does the Big Five measure?
The Big Five describes personality through five broad traits, commonly called openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (sometimes framed as its opposite, emotional stability).
Unlike the MBTI’s categories, the Big Five treats traits as a spectrum. Someone might be more or less conscientious, for example, rather than belonging to one of two fixed “types”. Researchers widely use the model to study personality, and some employers use assessments based on it as one part of a broader selection process.
That doesn’t make every Big Five questionnaire equally good, or every hiring use automatically fair. A score is still an estimate based on a person’s answers. Applicants may feel pressure to give answers they think an employer wants, and a broad trait score may not tell an employer whether someone can do the actual work.
How do employers use personality tests?
Employers may use assessments to support several activities:
Recruitment and selection: looking for characteristics they believe are relevant to a role.
Team development: helping colleagues discuss differences in communication or work preferences.
Coaching and professional development: giving employees prompts for reflection and goal-setting.
Career planning: helping someone consider the kinds of tasks or environments they may enjoy.
These uses aren’t interchangeable. An optional discussion tool used for development has different consequences from a test that affects a hiring decision. The higher the stakes, the more important it is to ask whether the assessment is suitable for that job, consistently administered, and interpreted by someone qualified to do so.
For hiring, a personality assessment should be connected to real requirements of the role and considered alongside other relevant evidence. The US Office of Personnel Management, for example, says personality tests used in candidate assessment must meet technical standards for employment selection procedures.
Are personality tests fair to employees?
That’s the question employers should be willing to answer clearly.
A test may feel unfair if employees or applicants don’t know why they’re being asked to take it, how the results will be used, who will see them, or whether they can challenge an interpretation. It can also be unfair when a label becomes a limit, when someone is passed over for a project because they’re considered “too introverted”, for instance, rather than being assessed on their skills and interest.
Fairness also depends on whether the assessment is relevant to the work and whether it treats people appropriately across different backgrounds and circumstances. A single score should not stand in for a person’s performance, abilities or capacity to grow.
A useful distinction is whether the test opens up a conversation or closes one down. If it helps an employee describe their preferences and make choices for themselves, it may support development. If it is used to pigeonhole them or quietly narrow their opportunities, it deserves closer scrutiny.
Questions employees can ask
If an employer asks you to complete a personality assessment, you can ask:
What is the purpose of this assessment?
Will the result affect hiring, promotion, work allocation or performance decisions?
Who will see my results, and how long will they be kept?
How is the assessment relevant to the role or development activity?
Will the result be considered alongside other evidence, and can I discuss or correct its interpretation?
You don’t need to treat a test result as a complete description of who you are. Personality can offer a lens for reflection, but it doesn’t replace your experience, skills, judgement or ambitions.
The MBTI and Big Five aren’t the same kind of tool. The MBTI sorts preferences into types and its own guidance rules out using those results to screen applicants or assign roles. The Big Five measures broad traits on scales and may be used in some employment assessments, but that still calls for care, evidence and transparency.
Personality tests are most defensible when they help people understand themselves and support a genuine development conversation. When an employer uses them to make decisions about someone’s livelihood, employees deserve to know the purpose, the limits and how fairness is being protected.
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