OPUSBOB: Are personality profile tests legal?

The topic of our blog for today is one that comes up very commonly in conversations regarding personality profiling tools and what some people call personality profile tests. And that is: our personality profile tests legal? Well, you’ll often get a very abrupt response from people in the trade, and they say, of course, they are legal. We wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t legal. The reality is the topic deserves a serious response and here’s what you need to be able to understand. Personality profiling can be used in two ways within an organization. It could be used as an inclusive tool or it can be used as an exclusive tool.

It’s very simple to understand the difference. If you’re using the tool as an inclusive tool, it means that you have already evaluated your candidates at some level; you’ve reviewed their resumes, perhaps you’ve talked to them on the phone, maybe you’ve even met with them in person. You recognize that this is a person that you are actively interested in including in your organization. The profiling tool provides you with new information that allows you to better understand the nature of that person. You want to know how to better manage them, how to provide leadership, how to provide guidance and direction, and to understand a comparison, in some cases, between them and other candidates that you are looking to include.

In that situation, utilizing a profiling tool is very easy to build into your overall evaluation process. Using it as an exclusive tool is completely different. That means that you’ve made a determination that you want to exclude candidates for no other reason than their behavioral profile results. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re hiring flight attendants and you’ve determined that your top flight attendants all have patience as a high trade. And you’ve said we are going to use a profiling tool and anybody that has patience as a low trade is going to be excluded, no matter what else may exist.

Well, in that situation, then an organization need to be prepared to show that your evaluation of that top performer trade crosses across all minorities, all ages, all genders, you need to be able to show that you are excluding people in a fair and proper way. So, utilizing a tool as an exclusionary tool really takes a bit more work, and it’s a completely different application. Our clients and the nature of the work that we do are utilizing our tool as an inclusionary tool. They’re looking to understand the strengths of an individual and evaluate that how person can fit into their organization. It makes the process much easier and much clearer from a legal perspective.

Should you have additional questions about this specific topic, please feel free to reach out to me, and I’d be happy to respond to you one-on-one. Thank you.