Finding the right sort of personality to join your company can be very challenging. There are billions of people living in the world, and only a handful that would truly be a perfect match for your business’ culture and work ethic. A machine can function properly only when all of its cogs are synergistic and well-oiled, and we’d argue that applies to your organization as well. That is the reason why innumerable companies use the Myers-Briggs personality types in order to help their hiring decisions.
With so many wrong first impressions being made and interviews going awry these days, finding the correct type of employee can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. The truth is, employees don’t come into their own until after their first year of tenure, and you can’t easily determine whether or not an employee would really be a good fit for your company, which leads to many missed hiring opportunities.
This is where the aforementioned Myers-Briggs type indicator personality test comes in. It is considered to be an industry standard for many companies and is extensively used by HR departments as it helps categorize psychological tendencies and preferences.
We’re going to show you how you can apply the Myers-Briggs personality types to your hiring decisions so that you know exactly what sort of person you’re looking to hire and help bloom within your company!
What Are the Myers-Briggs Personality Types?
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, also known as the MBTI, is described as being a self-report questionnaire whose purpose is to gather the psychological preferences and perceptions of an individual.
In short, it is basically a self-help assessment test that helps you realize what type of person you are when it comes to your overall personality. This can be anything from the decisions you tend to make from the situations in which you enjoy placing yourself.
The MBTI presents four categories that are important to the test, those being introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. The result of the test is determined by a letter taken from each completed test category and is relevant to what type of personality you have, such as “ENTP,” which refers to Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.
Why Is the Myers-Briggs Test Used?
The primary use of the Myers-Briggs test is to aid you in finding yourself. This is harder than it sounds in today’s day and age, where legions of young men and women await their next weekend with bated breath and no direction in life. Described as a self-help, self-assessment test, the MBTI is supposed to give you a helping hand when trying to orient yourself.
An example of why the Myers-Briggs personality types are used is to assist in finding a career path to embark on; each of the test results comes with a small list of suggestions, such as what types of career would be best suited for your personality. Many teenagers take the MBTI as a fun exercise in realizing what they’d like to do when they grow up.
Your probable career choices aren’t the only aspect of your life that the MBTI covers. Among the traits and characteristics the test can glean, it can also determine your foremost strengths and weaknesses, which can be a highly validating and eye-opening experience.
It can therefore be easy to see how the Myers-Briggs personality types would serve as a great aid to hiring managers.
How Can the MBTI Help My Company?
We’d first like to state that explicitly using a tool such as the Myers-Briggs personality test as a pre-employment assessment would not be the best of ideas. This is because the purpose of the test is to help determine an employee’s personality and not necessarily their expected workplace performance.
In fact, the Myers-Briggs website itself states, “It is not ethical to use the MBTI instrument for hiring or for deciding job assignments. However, knowledge of type theory may help people recognize why they may be satisfied or dissatisfied with their jobs, and knowledge of type almost always helps teams and co-workers communicate better.”
The Myers-Briggs personality types can be useful when trying to decide if the personality of a candidate is fitting for the work environment you have carefully cultivated, but should not be taken as gospel when making a hiring decision. The test itself is supposed to offer a different perspective, not change the playing field altogether.
With that being said, you also have a very valid reason to use the test when it comes to perfecting your workplace atmosphere and culture. An estimated 1 out of every 5 Fortune 1,000 companies make use of the test in either their hiring process, team-building exercises, or overall management practices.
Before detailing what the MBTI can help you with, let’s mention what it can’t.
3 Reasons Not to Use Myers-Briggs
The Myers-Briggs personality test is intended to be a self-help tool in order to glean your true personality. It can be easy to see, then, why it should not be used to judge a person’s skills and abilities. Using the MBTI as a test will lead to an overall catastrophe.
Picking the answers that an employee would find as the “correct” ones is very easy. If you know your employer is looking for a particularly thoughtful individual, then manipulating the answers of the test so that the result comes out as “INTJ” would be a walk in the park.
To make matters worse, the test can also be faulty when determining a person’s personality type. You can take the test and receive the “ENTP” result the first time, declaring you a grandiose debater and philosopher, while the second time you try it might reveal you as an “ENTJ” instead. The MBTI is not fool-proof under any circumstances and should not be expected to perform flawlessly.
Using the Myers-Briggs personality types to decide on whether an employee would be a good worker is also a horrible idea. The performance of an individual cannot be quantified through their overall personality regardless of the traits they exhibit through the test. Any person is able to accomplish achievements in a field they have no experience in if they try; some can even be said to be naturally better than others, their talent being hidden deep inside.
2 Reasons to Use Myers-Briggs
The best way to use the MBTI for your hiring decisions is so that you can glean the personality of an individual and thus know how to approach them. If you know a person is motivated by, say, financial incentives, then it will be much easier to inspire them. The test is also useful when breaking a fair tie, such as when you have two employees that are equally skilled. That is one of the situations in which we believe that differences in personality count.
One of the reasons the Myers-Briggs personality types are frequently used in team-building exercises is to assist in building rapport between people. Understanding your co-workers can be made easier when you know what their test result is, which greatly aids in overall teamwork. Our professional suggestion would be to use the test in order to help diversify your workplace, rather than to try and cultivate a business society of homogenous thinkers.
Understand Your Employees
Despite common belief, the Myers-Briggs test has not been designed to be a pre-employment assessment. Many people even believe it has become outdated ever since its inception during World War II. The truth, however, is that the MBTI has been continually improving ever since its development, with the Consulting Psychologists Press considering it a good tool for self-recognition and introspection.
If you’re thinking about using the MBTI for hiring decisions, then use it to gain a unique perspective on your candidates, not as an equalizer. Want to read more about pre-employment assessments? Consider taking a look at our Cognitive Ability Test!
