It’s the underlying promise of human resources: If you put the right people in the right jobs with the right support, magic happens. At MEA, we know getting all those “rights” aligned is quite a trick — one that actually requires strategically applied science. That’s where behavioral assessments come in. The best assessment tools give you evidenced-based insights to strengthen your hiring practices, team development, management skills, and more. We’ve put together a guide to explain how behavioral assessments can help you pull off the miracle of just-right fits and why we’ve chosen The Predictive Index (PI) as our go-to assessment system.
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The challenges of hiring and building teams
Whether you’re an executive overseeing an entire enterprise or an HR professional tasked with talent acquisition, you know the key to meeting your goals is putting the right people in the right roles. You also know people are complicated. Human beings have an infinitely wide range of work styles and skills, which can lead to problems when that diversity isn’t taken into account.
Recruiting challenges
Traditional recruiting practices emphasize a candidate’s past work experience and interview panache. Unfortunately, first impressions can be misleading, and resumes rarely give much insight into the hows and whys behind a candidate’s whats. Organizations can be overwhelmed by big applicant pools and disappointed when a promising new hire turns out to be stylistically mismatched with the position or a team.
Team-building challenges
When those employees remain in mismatched roles, all kinds of employee engagement problems can ensue. Employees will underperform, and team motivation can tank. Without clarity on the stylistic differences behind misunderstandings and/or conflicts, team unity is a pipe dream. Eventually, organizations will lose top talent to competitors who offer them better fits.
Management challenges
Similarly, when an organization has behavioral blindspots, managers can find themselves struggling to support and inspire their direct reports. Managers need to understand both their own style of working and their employees’ to lead well.
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The benefits of behavioral assessments
Behavioral assessments help bring order to the chaos and confusion of human collaboration. Science-based assessments can help organizations make better hiring decisions, nurture healthy teams and support leaders. Here are a few of the advantages of integrating a behavioral assessment tool into your organization:
Filter applicants by actual job fit, not experience alone.
Use behavioral assessments during the hiring process to narrow the pool to candidates whose work styles, not just work experiences, fit the open position and team needs.
Take a more data-led and objective approach to hiring.
Instead of relying on first impressions and gut feelings, use a well-tested behavioral assessment to make smarter hiring decisions.
Tailor employee engagement efforts for better retention.
Instead of guessing at one-size-fits-all motivators, behavioral assessments can help you customize rewards, encouragement, and interventions to employees’ individual styles.
Build stronger, more productive teams.
Behavioral assessments can help teams understand how to better communicate and cooperate. A clear understanding of collective styles can highlight strengths and reveal potential trouble spots ahead of time.
Help managers hone their leadership skills.
Managing is hard! Give your managers a leg up by providing them with an objective toolkit to help them understand the various work styles and motivators of the unique individuals on their team! Managers who know their own work styles can cross-reference those of direct reports for clearer interactions and more productive work relationships.
Give employees tools for professional development.
Self-knowledge is a powerful thing! Behavioral assessments can help individual employees identify workplace strengths, stressors, and help them seek professional development opportunities that will give them a career-growth edge.
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Types of behavioral assessments
According to some estimates, there are 2,000 personality assessments available in what has become a $2 billion market.1 If you are looking for behavioral assessments designed to help your organization operate more efficiently, you have options. Lots of options. Here are some of the most popular:
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator was created by a self-taught mother-daughter team. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung, the MBTI was first published in 1944. Sixteen profiles are based on four dichotomies: Extraversion versus introversion, intuition versus sensing, feeling versus thinking, and judging versus perceiving. Despite its popularity and wide use in corporate America over decades, the MBTI has not fared well under scientific scrutiny and has been criticized for a lack of both reliability, predictability, and evidence for the fundamental typing structure.
DISC
The popular DISC method is often described as a communication tool, not a hiring tool. Based on a 1928 typing theory by William Moulton Marston, DISC was created by an industrial psychologist who was also a colleague of the founder of Predictive Index. The DISC assessment is a forced-choice test that divides participants into four quadrant colors, based on whether they are more reserved versus outgoing or more task- or people-oriented. If you’ve ever heard someone say, “I’m a blue!” or “I’m a yellow!” they are speaking DISC language.
Caliper
Caliper is another contender in the behavioral assessment space. It offers a variety of tests tailored to different types of positions. In contrast to the Predictive Index, which has a much shorter assessment, Caliper’s evaluations can take up to two hours and are most often done toward the end of the hiring process.
Predictive Index
Predictive Index (PI) is MEA’s chosen behavioral assessment partner for its evidenced-based approach, comprehensive tools, and simple yet effective tests. Founded by Arnold Daniels in 1955 and validated by hundreds of studies, the Predictive Index offers behavioral, job, and cognitive assessments with wrap-around analytical software to help organizations excel. PI uses 17 different descriptive reference profiles to help employees and managers understand each other better and deliver hiring, managing, and team insights. MEA has been using PI since 2013 and has two Certified Master Trainers on staff to help members get the most of this powerful tool.
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How the Predictive Index works
The Predictive Index combines insights from three different assessments to help companies make better hiring decisions, improve management relationships, and build more effective teams.
The PI Behavioral Assessment
The foundational PI behavioral assessment is an untimed, free-choice tool that takes about six minutes to finish. Employees or candidates choose from two lists of adjectives that help measure four behavioral drives (dominance, extraversion, patience, and formality) to arrive at a verifiably reliable predictor of workplace behavior or style. The assessment assigns people to one of 17 reference profiles, based on shared workplace characteristics.
The PI Cognitive Assessment (PI CA)
The second PI behavioral assessment is used during the hiring process to measure whether candidates’ cognitive skills match a particular position’s cognitive demands. The PI CA measures general cognition, which is commonly referred to as a G-score. This is a timed test with 50 numerical, abstract, and verbal questions. Candidates have 12 minutes to answer as many questions as they can. Practice tests are available to help candidates prep and feel confident before taking the assessment.
The PI Job Assessment
Finally, this third assessment lets organizations map the particular styles and cognitive abilities needed to succeed at a particular position. The outcome? Clearly defined Job Targets for both existing and open positions that can help you make more objective and effective hiring, succession planning, and talent management decisions.
PI combines these three assessments to deliver actionable insights throughout the full life cycle of human resources, from hiring to retiring.
A note on assessment and equal opportunity employment laws: Behavior is not a protected class, and employers are allowed to use tests and assessments to predict whether candidates or employees will perform well in any given position. It is illegal, of course, to use tests to intentionally discriminate against any protected class (race, color, religion, sex or national origin, for example). The Predictive Index is built to meet the EEOC’s non-discrimination requirements and can be a way for employers to weed out unconscious bias with an objective, shared measure of fit.
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Integrating the Predictive Index into your organization
The Predictive Index is used in four main ways, with a specific set of tools and insights available for each purpose. Organizations can start with whichever function is most needed at the moment. If you’re having recruitment challenges, begin with the “Hire” toolbox. Underperforming teams? Start with “Design.” Managers struggling to connect? Go straight to “Inspire.” Don’t quite know what’s wrong? “Diagnose” is your best first bet.
Design
PI’s Design function is for building better teams. The PI software can analyze a team’s particular combination of reference profiles to show a clear picture of the teams’ strengths and weaknesses. Team leaders can map their strategies and objectives against that talent portrait to see where their opportunities and blind spots may be.
For example, if your team is tasked with creating dependable, reliable software, but you have a team full of agile innovators, you might run into problems making your product work. But you’ll have way more good ideas than you know what to do with! It doesn’t mean the existing team is wrong for the work. You’ll just have a better idea of what your challenges are and if you need to balance out any strength areas.
Hire
After setting Job Targets using PI’s Job Assessment, your recruiting team will have an objective, visual map of behavioral and cognitive goals for each position. Using both the Behavioral and Cognitive Assessments early in the hiring process will help you quickly and fairly identify your top candidates. The PI hiring toolbox even includes individual interview guides for each candidate with suggested questions to confirm workplace style matches and probe any misalignments. Know which candidates are most likely to thrive in open positions, and who needs your most competitive offers.
Inspire
Inspire is a toolkit manager can use to support employees in individual, custom ways tailored to their unique behavioral profiles. Managers can access a strategy guide for each employee’s direct report; the guide walks them through ways to keep employees motivated, engaged, and growing. The guide also includes one-to-one relationship insights on how the manager’s and employee’s styles might align or diverge to foster better communication and healthy work relationships.
The inspiration doesn’t have to just happen top-down! Individual employees can access a similar guide to better understand their own ways of working with suggestions for nurturing personal development.
Diagnose
Struggling to get to the root of multiple, murky workplace roadblocks? PI also offers a tool to diagnose what may be going wrong. Using anonymous engagement surveys (that aren’t tied to individual behavioral insights), PI uses its analytical prowess to highlight challenges and deliver problem-solving tools.
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How much do behavioral assessments cost?
The costs of personality assessments can vary widely. Some providers give away their tests for free but charge for workshops or training sessions to learn how to use the assessments. Others, like the Predictive Index, have a modular pricing system based on company size. The costs of integrating a behavioral assessment into your organization will differ based on:
- Length of use: Is the assessment a one-time workshop or a comprehensive system designed to augment all stages of the HR lifecycle?
- Number of employees: Most behavioral assessments will cost more as the number of employees you want to test goes up.
- Available tools: Behavioral assessments that come with a complete analytics and integration toolbox tend to cost more than one-and-done tests.
- Guided approach versus DIY: Some assessments build the costs of on-going support into their pricing.
As with any HR budget line item, you should consider the goals you are trying to achieve with behavioral assessment tools and calculate the costs of not using them as well. For example, ask yourself:
- What are you currently paying to re-recruit after unsuccessful hires?
- What are personality conflicts and work-style misunderstandings costing you in lost productivity?
- How much untapped value is hidden in current employees who are simply in the wrong roles?
- Are you losing favored candidates to organizations that do a better job matching personalities to roles?
Factor these very real opportunity costs into your behavioral assessment budgeting.
At MEA, we offer the modular pricing system for PI, and have numerous workshops and training that are high-value add-ons.
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Questions to ask behavioral assessment providers
Once you have your budget set, it’s time to set your organization’s behavioral assessment priorities. If you have a clear view of the challenges you are trying to address and the goals you’d like to meet, you’ll be able to vet potential assessment partners quickly. In addition to questions regarding your particular needs, consider these queries as you interview assessment providers:
Is the behavioral assessment evidence-based?
What studies have been done to verify its usefulness? Is there proof of reliability (do people receive similar results with repeated assessments)? Is the assessment based on solid, current science?
Will this tool help the entire HR lifecycle or is it targeted to a specific challenge?
If you are looking for a comprehensive solution to multiple workplace challenges, make sure the provider can deliver across the HR board.
Are there any assessment barriers to overcome?
Assessments that are long or needlessly complicated can reduce adherence and lead results that are not actionable. Are the assessments designed to be integrated into your existing processes, or will they require any big overhauls or additional staffing?
What tools do I get and how easy are they to use?
Ensure the tools you’re getting match your organization’s goals. Test drive any included software or tools. Are they intuitive and relatively simple to learn? Will your staff be able to quickly get to the insights they need?
What support will I get from your team?
Are you on your own post-purchase, or does the assessment come with any support? Are support tools more general (helplines, online tutorials), or are you assigned a particular coach or guide?
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Why choose MEA & the Predictive Index?
When MEA began evaluating behavioral assessments almost a decade ago, we knew we wanted to provide the absolute best for our members and clients. Here’s why we adopted Predictive Index as our exclusive assessment tool — and why we recommend using it alongside MEA’s other services.
Extensively trained & knowledgeable consultants
Our first green flag: Becoming a certified PI consultant and a certified partner organization requires a significant time commitment. We loved that PI had high standards for training and collaboration. MEA has two Certified Master Trainers on staff to help guide your organization’s PI journey, including training your staff. Even better, both Holly DePalma and Margaret Uhrich have deep HR backgrounds and expertise. They don’t just know behavioral assessment best practices; they know how to use assessments to meet today’s human resources challenges. In addition to individual guidance, MEA’s PI users can also join Holly’s monthly virtual gathering to share experiences, tips, and troubleshoot any problems.
A comprehensive, evidenced-based system
Unlike many other behavioral assessments on the market, PI is built on 65+ years of credible science, certified by the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations (EFPA), and backed up by hundreds of studies. If that wasn’t enough, we’ve also heard incredible anecdotal evidence from the many organizations who have integrated PI into their HR systems.
We also needed a hiring-to-retiring tool that would serve our members’ wide variety of needs. With PI, we have a comprehensive solution that provides extensive insights and tailored tools … all from three simple-to-execute assessments. That was the sweet spot for us: assessments that were easy to administer but that could deliver an amazing array of tools that provided solutions for the complete spectrum of HR challenges.
Backed up by the full power of MEA
Finally, PI perfectly complements our portfolio of HR services. Instead of contracting with a separate assessment provider, our members can come to one source for both assessment tools and their other HR needs. Furthermore, if PI’s insights lead to additional needs — recruiting process changes or training to balance out a team, for example — we’re here to help with it all.
Are you ready to solve your HR stressors and get back to growing your business?
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- “The $2 Billion Question of Who You Are at Work,” by Emma Goldberg. The New York Times. 5 March 2023. Accessed 13 August 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/05/business/remote-work-personality-tests.html
