Methodological Updates in Personality Assessment for High-Stakes Use

Abstract

Abstract Personality assessments are commonly used in high-stakes settings such as job applicant screening. This is largely because personality has been shown to predict individual and organizational outcomes such as job performance, job satisfaction, and turnover. Additionally, personality assessments rarely show adverse impact across racial groups and demonstrate incremental validity over and above predictors such as cognitive ability tests. Recently, research and practice surrounding personality assessment has accelerated with respect to both information technology and psychometric theory. This chapter reviews several advancements associated with forced-choice measures as well as rapid response measurement (RRM). With RRM, personality adjectives are presented one at a time and a dichotomous response is given. Response time is recorded and faster responses are given more weight than slower responses. Reliable and valid RRM requires only 10 to 20 seconds per trait and has been empirically shown to be more faking resistant than some alternative methods.