The Big Five personality model in hiring

The five traits and what they look like at work

The Big Five describes personality along five broad traits. Each one is a continuum: most people score somewhere in the middle, and both ends have advantages and drawbacks depending on the work. A questionnaire reports a score per trait, compared with a norm group.

• Openness: curiosity, interest in ideas and a liking for variety. At work it shows in how readily someone tries new approaches and how comfortable they are with ambiguity rather than routine.
• Conscientiousness: planning, care, persistence and reliability. It shows in keeping commitments, working to a plan and finishing what was started.
• Extraversion: energy from contact with others, assertiveness and ease in groups. It shows in how readily someone takes the floor, builds a network or seeks people out.
• Agreeableness: cooperation, trust and consideration for others. It shows in how someone handles conflicting interests: looking for common ground, or holding firm.
• Emotional stability, whose low end is often called neuroticism: staying calm under pressure, after setbacks and when criticised. It shows in how someone deals with deadlines, complaints and uncertainty.

What the research says

Personality has been studied as a predictor of job performance for decades. Two pieces of work are cited particularly often.

In a meta-analysis across occupational groups, Barrick and Mount (1991) found conscientiousness to be the trait most consistently related to job performance. Extraversion was related to performance mainly in jobs with a strong social component, such as management and sales. The other traits showed weaker or more role-specific relationships.

More recently, Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens (2022) re-examined the validity estimates for common selection methods. They put the correlation between conscientiousness and job performance at about 0.19, and that of structured interviews at about 0.42.

What that means in practice

• Personality matters, but the effect is modest. A conscientiousness score on its own explains only a small part of why one person performs better than another.
• Its value lies in adding information that other methods capture less well, such as a preferred way of working, not in replacing those methods.
• Which traits are relevant depends on the role. A trait that helps in one job can be neutral, or even a drawback, in another.
• Research averages describe groups, not individuals. They tell you which traits are worth including in a role profile, not what a single candidate will do.

Fit to the role, not ‘higher is better’

A common mistake is to read Big Five scores as a ranking: the more conscientious, stable and extraverted, the better. In most roles that is not how it works. Very high conscientiousness can come with rigidity in a job that changes daily; very high extraversion can be draining in a job that needs long stretches of focused work. The question is not how high a score is, but what the role asks for.

Build the role profile first

1. Describe the work: the main tasks, the context and what good performance looks like, based on a job analysis and conversations with people who know the role.
2. Decide which traits are relevant and set a range for each that suits the work. Leave a trait out when there is no clear reason to include it.
3. Agree the profile before you see any candidate results, so it is not shaped around a favourite.
4. Compare every candidate with the same profile and note where they fall outside the range.

Base the profile on the work, not on the style of the current job holder or the hiring manager. A profile that copies one person tends to reproduce that person, which narrows your pool without improving prediction. Talent matching on Match.hr follows this route: role profile and candidate side by side, trait by trait, with the largest gaps highlighted.

Common pitfalls

Socially desirable answering

Candidates know a job is at stake, and some will present themselves more favourably than they really are. Clear instructions help: there are no right answers, and an unrealistic profile tends to show when you ask about concrete behaviour. Treat the profile as a starting point for questions, not as a verdict.

Using a trait as a cut-off

Rejecting everyone below a set score on one trait turns a modest predictor into a hard filter. Given the size of the relationships, you will turn away people who would have done well, and you may disadvantage groups if the scale does not work equally well for everyone. Use gaps to decide what to ask, not whom to drop. How group differences are checked is explained under fairness and bias.

Reading one trait in isolation

Traits combine. Low agreeableness with high conscientiousness can describe a firm, principled negotiator; the same low agreeableness with low emotional stability may play out differently under pressure. Read the whole profile, with the role profile next to it, before drawing a conclusion from one scale.

A development questionnaire used for selection

Some personality questionnaires are designed for coaching or team development. They may lack applicant norms, evidence that they predict performance, or safeguards against faking. Check the intended use stated by the publisher. The same applies to practice tests, such as those on Assessment-Training.com: they help candidates prepare and are not selection instruments.

Language and norm group

A translated questionnaire does not automatically measure the same thing, and a score only means something relative to the group it is compared with. Check that the language version has been analysed separately and that the norm group suits your candidates, for example by country, language and working population. Someone answering in a second language may read some statements differently.

How to use the Big Five well

• Start from a role profile, agreed before anyone sees results.
• Combine personality with other evidence: a structured interview and, where the role calls for it, a cognitive ability test or a skills test. Each method covers something the others miss.
• Tell candidates beforehand what you will measure, why, and how you will use the results. Make clear that there are no right answers.
• Discuss the results with the candidate. Ask about concrete situations behind the largest gaps and give them room to add context.
• Record how you weighed the results, so the decision can be explained afterwards.
• Let a person make the decision. A personality profile supports a judgement; it does not replace it.

The personality assessments on Match.hr are based on the Big Five, and each one states its intended use, its reliability per scale and the norm group it is compared with.