What's The 'Best' Personality Type For An Employee?

As recruiters, we’re always out looking for the best talents to hire: the best skills, the best alma mater, the best resume. So naturally from a personality pre-employment assessment, we might expect to find candidates who have the best personality to join our company.

But what does the ‘best personality’ look like? Is there even such a thing as the perfect personality?

Is there a best personality?

Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. There is no one type of ‘best’ personality that will perform great in all situations.

It’s simple when we talk about IQ or skills, as higher numbers will always give better performance no matter what. This is what we call a supplementary variable — higher is always better.

But it’s not like that with personality.

Unlike intelligence, personality is measured in a continuum (or range). It’s not about getting the highest numbers, but more about where you are in the continuum. This is what we call a complementary variable.

The Extraversion continuum in the Big Five Personality Model. The continuum is more accurate because it doesn't oversimplify personality using a binary measurement.

In personality, low scores aren’t necessarily bad. A low score simply means a high score on the other side of the spectrum. In the example above, low extraversion simply means highly introverted.

Hence it’s easier to view personality as a left-right scale, not a high-low one. It’s about your position on the spectrum, and it’s about describing who you are, how you act, and how you behave, i.e. your personality.

That is why there is no one ‘best’ type of personality template for all jobs.

Then how do you know if a personality is good for a job?

Instead of looking for the best personality, we should be looking for the best personality fit. This is because there are many different dimensions and facets in personality, and they all fit different types of jobs and tasks.

For example, the dimensions Conscientiousness has a high correlation with job performance, so you may think higher is always better.

Yet Conscientiousness contains a facet called Cautiousness which gives the tendency to be deliberate and double-check everything slowly. While this is great for jobs that require minimum errors like accounting, it may not be a good fit for jobs where everything has to move quickly and forces you to adapt.

Personality is complex and there is no one-size-fits-all.

So, it’s about looking for the right fit between personality and job. Our assessments define the qualities of personality, and our database is populated with the qualities of tasks and jobs. Then it’s only a matter of finding the right fit between them.

How do you explain ‘bad’ personalities?

While it’s not fair to accuse someone of having a ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ personality, it’s important to acknowledge that there exists a dark side of human personality. It’s called the dark tetrad, and we at Dreamtalent are currently cooking up a test for it right now, so stay tuned!

The Dark Cube by Garcia & Moraga, 2017, derived from the dark triad of personality. It features 3 axes: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. There are 8 types of malevolent characteristics in the dark cube: Benevolent, Machiavellian, Psychopathic, Anti-Social, Narcissistic, Manipulative Narcissistic, Psychopathic Narcissistic, and Maleficent.

What to do with personalities that don’t fit?

The great thing about fit is that it works both ways, just like how low extraversion simply means high introversion in the example earlier.

If a candidate’s personality doesn’t fit this job, that means they would fit another, different job in your company.

Why reject a promising talent when you can simply redirect them?

With a job forecasting assessment, you can tell which jobs are best fit for an individual’s personality, and turn a possible rejection into a valuable talent for your company.