The Wrong Pre-Employment Assessment Is Quietly Killing Your Talent Pipeline
Pre-employment personality tests are everywhere—but are they helping or hurting your hiring? In this article, we explore how tools like DISC and Myers-Briggs are being misused in hiring processes, especially in healthcare settings where the stakes are high and talent is scarce. Discover which assessments actually predict job performance, how candidate expectations are evolving, and what a smarter, more equitable hiring strategy really looks like.
Here’s a truth most people in talent acquisition don’t want to admit:
Hiring assessments are being misused. Every day. In ways that are actively harming hiring.
I’m not here to bash pre-employment assessments. Here at Staffing Proxy, we use them. We are huge advocates for them.
I believe in using the right kind of personality test, at the right time, for the right reason. But what I see is a lot of hiring managers clinging to tools that are irrelevant at best and discriminatory at worst.
However, in industries such as healthcare - where great talent is scarce, and the wrong hire can compromise care, culture, and compliance - you simply can’t afford to rely on outdated assessments that tell you everything about someone’s personality type and nothing about their actual job readiness.
The wrong assessment can be limiting your talent pool
See, the thing about personality assessments such as DISC and Myers-Briggs (MBTI) is that they are great for profiling. They are great for understanding how a person will approach a team dynamic, but they don’t predict future job performance.
In fact, the research alone speaks for itself. One meta-analysis concluded that personality tests like DISC and MBTI have virtually no predictive validity when it comes to actual performance.
Even the MBTI Foundation and DISC Profile themselves caution against using the test for hiring:
- Myers-Briggs: “We do not condone the use of the MBTI tool for any sort of hiring or selection.”
- DISC Profile: “Remember that neither Myers-Briggs nor DiSC is designed to be an instrument predictive of future behavior. So neither should be used as pre-hire assessments.”
Yet, despite clear warnings not to use these assessments for hiring, we are still seeing hiring teams plugging them into the early stages of their recruitment process.
Why? Because they probably read a LinkedIn post about how they need to incorporate these tests in the hiring stage to provide neat labels on how a person will work within your team.
But neat labels don’t save patient lives, navigate a crisis, or work a night shift understaffed and under pressure.
What they do is block perfectly capable candidates based on arbitrary personality codes. And in doing so, they increase the risk of bias against neurodivergent candidates, those from non-traditional backgrounds, and anyone who doesn’t fit the tidy boxes these tests were designed to enforce.
That’s not selection. That’s exclusion.
Learn more about what your employee value proposition says about your business, here.
Your candidates are judging you
Yes, your candidates are judging you, too. In fact, 60% of candidates abandon applications if the process feels too long or confusing.
But it’s not because candidates are allergic to testing. It’s because they expect it to be meaningful and respectful of their time.
What candidates want isn’t fewer pre-employment assessments. They want smarter ones. Ones that help them showcase their strengths, not squeeze them into a personality framework that was never built for hiring in the first place.
And they don’t want to complete one at the first stage of engagement. It’s best to have an interview first, engage with them personally, then get them to do an assessment.
At the end of the day, candidates are comparing your process to every other offer they’re getting. And a clunky, outdated, or an unclear pre-employment assessment experience doesn’t just reflect poorly on your HR team; it reflects on your culture.
It tells candidates everything they need to know about how decisions are made inside your organization.
Do you really want your first impression as an employer to be that your hiring process is more about categorizing people than actually understanding what they bring to the table?
What actually predicts performance?
So what does work?
When it comes to predicting job success, researchers have found that cognitive ability tests, structured interviews, and skills-based assessments are at the top of the list.
These methods aren’t just more predictive, they’re also more respectful of candidate potential. They test for actual capability, not abstract personality categories. They help you see what someone can do, not how they rank on a personality scale.
And in a sector such as healthcare - especially the audiology industry - where talent is already a scarcity, you do not want to be pushing talent away or cancelling them out because they lean more toward introversion or extroversion.
Now, this is not to say don’t use personality tests for employment. They have their time and day. And we use them here at Staffing Proxy - just not at the first initial stage of interaction.
We speak to candidates first. Understand their skills, ambitions, and professional experience. Then we send out a pre-employment personality assessment.
Assessments should help you hire, not hinder
What assessment do we use, you ask? Criteria’s Employee Personality Profile (EPP) is a personality assessment that’s actually built for hiring (by the way, this is not a sponsored blog).
Unlike DISC or MBTI, the EPP isn’t about labels. It measures 12 distinct personality traits and maps them against job-specific benchmarks.
There’s no pass/fail. No “ideal” personality. Just rich, interpretable data that helps hiring managers understand how someone is likely to behave at work, and whether that aligns with what the role demands.
The result? A personality profile that’s as informative for candidates as it is for employers.
Need help building a smarter assessment strategy?
Contact us at Staffing Proxy to learn how we can help you attract and select the right healthcare talent - fairly, efficiently, and backed by science.
