3 key takeaways
- Work personality tests enhance team collaboration by revealing each member’s strengths, communication styles, and motivators.
- Aligning roles with personality types boosts productivity and job satisfaction.
- Teal's Work Style Assessment can help you find your core strengths and areas for improvement for free.
Picture this: a workplace where everyone understands each other’s strengths, quirks, and communication styles. No more guessing games or politics—just a well-oiled machine of productivity and camaraderie.
That’s the promise of workplace personality tests.
They offer deep dives into what drives each team member, spotlighting strengths, revealing weaknesses, and uncovering hidden motivators.
Why should you care?
Because understanding your work personality—and those of your colleagues—can help you build your dream professional life. It’s about transforming tricky jobs into good fits and finding your next opportunity with the right pathfinders to guide you.
Struggling to find the best work personality test? Sign up for Teal and try the Work Style Assessment for free.
The importance of work personality tests
Work personality tests are more than just a trendy HR tool—they're a strategic asset for job seekers serious about personal and professional growth. By revealing your strengths and weaknesses, these tests help you understand what the right culture fit looks like for you.
Whether it's the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) outlining your psychological preferences or the CliftonStrengths identifying your talents, these assessments help you align your values to your goals.
The benefits don’t stop at self-awareness, though. These work tests also help:
- You build relationships by helping you understand how your colleagues require feedback, downtime, or social interactions.
- Managers tailor their management approaches to fit each team member's unique personality and build a supportive work environment.
By understanding these dynamics, you can position yourself as a valuable job candidate and an ideal culture fit for every unique application.
The 7 best work personality tests
Understanding your unique traits and how they impact your work style is key to finding a fulfilling career. Here are the 7 best work personality tests to help you uncover those insights and steer your professional journey.
1. Teal Work Style Assessment
The Teal Work Style Assessment is a free tool designed to help you understand your natural work preferences and behaviors. This assessment dives deep into what energizes and drains you at work, empowering you to make more informed career decisions that align with your strengths and preferences.
What it is and how it works
Teal's Work Style Assessment is a comprehensive questionnaire consisting of 17 questions. Each question is carefully crafted to uncover key aspects of your professional behavior. Once completed, you'll receive a detailed report that offers valuable insights into your work style. Here's a breakdown:
1. Insight into professional behavior
The Teal Work Style Assessment provides a comprehensive analysis of your professional behavior, offering a detailed outline of how you approach tasks, interact with colleagues, and handle different work environments. By highlighting your behavior patterns, it helps you understand what drives your productivity and satisfaction at work, allowing you to make more informed career decisions and optimize your work environment.
2. Strength identification and preferences
Discover your core strengths and how they influence your work performance. Understanding these things will help you look for positions that align with your natural abilities. The report also highlights your work preferences, showing which tasks and environments energize you and which ones might drain your energy.
3. Actionable Recommendations
Get tailored recommendations based on your assessment results. These actionable tips help you make informed career decisions and improve your professional effectiveness.
Best suited for: Professionals at career crossroads looking for roles that align with their strengths. Whether you're a new graduate exploring career options, a mid-career professional aiming for a role change, or a manager trying to build an empathetic work environment, the Teal Work Style Assessment is the right fit for you.
Pricing: Free
2. Enneagram personality test
The Enneagram theory believes that by adulthood, most people develop a worldview that influences their thoughts, goals, working styles, and perceptions. This test is 11 pages long, with 10 questions on each page.
For each question, you rate yourself on a sliding scale based on how accurately the statement describes you. In the end, the Enneagram test categorizes you into one of nine dominant types and potential wings (adjacent types influencing your primary type). Here are the types:
- The Reformer: Motivated by a desire to live a principled and ethical life
- The Helper: Driven by a need to be loved and needed by others
- The Achiever: Focused on success and achievement to gain recognition
- The Individualist: Seeks authenticity and depth in their personal identity
- The Investigator: Driven by a need to understand and gain knowledge
- The Loyalist: Motivated by a need for security and guidance
- The Enthusiast: Seeks new experiences and avoids pain and boredom
- The Challenger: Motivated by a desire to protect themselves and control their environment
- The Peacemaker: Focused on maintaining internal peace and harmony
Understanding your Enneagram type can help you improve communication with colleagues, enhance teamwork, and identify personal growth areas. It provides insights into your motivations and behaviors, allowing you to leverage your strengths and address challenges more effectively in the workplace.
Best suited for: People seeking deep self-awareness, personal development, and improved relationships at work and in their personal lives.
Pricing: The Enneagram Institute conducts tests on behalf of organizations and you can also find out your Enneagram via a free test online.
3. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
MBTI is one of the most popular personality tests and was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers as an exploration of Carl Jung's book Psychological Types. It categorizes people into 16 personality types based on four pairs of contradictory traits:
- Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I): Focus on the outer world vs. the inner world
- Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N): Focus on concrete information vs. abstract information
- Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F): Decision-making based on logic vs. personal values
- Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P): Preference for structure vs. flexibility
MBTI has specific workplace recommendations that highlight how you’d perform as an employee, manager, and leader. The test also lists how your personality type can resolve conflicts or collaborate with other personality types.
Best suited for: Individuals who want to achieve a higher degree of self-awareness so they can look for career opportunities that better align with their natural personality traits.
Pricing: Free basic tests and up to $99 for detailed assessments and ebooks.
4. DiSC
DiSC, which stands for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness, helps you understand your observable workplace behaviors. Unlike the tests listed above, DiSC doesn’t take into account your intrinsic personality traits but is faster to complete.
The test recognizes that behaviors can change depending on the environment and situation—offering a more flexible understanding of personality.
Understanding your DiSC profile can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues, adapt your behavior to different work situations, and improve teamwork. By recognizing and adjusting to the diverse behaviors of your coworkers, you can foster a more collaborative and productive work environment.
Best suited for: Professionals looking to improve their workplace relationships and communication.
Pricing: $24 to $100, depending on the provider and depth of the report.
5. The Big Five Personality Test
The Big 5 Personality Test is a psychological assessment designed to measure five major dimensions of personality. The assessment typically involves a series of statements to which you respond on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
The results provide a detailed profile of your personality across the five dimensions psychological researchers use to understand behaviors and personality traits.
- Openness: your willingness to experience new things and be open to new ideas
- Conscientiousness: your level of organization, dependability, and work ethic
- Extraversion: your sociability, energy, and tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others
- Agreeableness: your level of compassion, cooperation, and tendency to avoid conflict
- Neuroticism: your tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, anger, and depression
Understanding these traits helps you gain insight into your behavioral tendencies, emotional reactions, and interpersonal dynamics.
Best suited for: Professionals exploring career paths or targeting self-improvement.
Pricing: $114 or more, depending on the provider.
6. The Holland Code Career Quiz
Truity created this assessment based on the Holland Code system developed by psychologist Dr. John L. Holland. It helps you match your personality and talents with best-fit jobs or roles.
The idea behind the quiz is that occupations—and personalities—fall into six main categories:
- Realistic/Building: Practical and hands-on work, often involving tools or machines
- Investigative/Thinking: Intellectual and conceptual jobs in fields like tech or academia
- Artistic/Creating: Unstructured and design-driven work in design or writing
- Social/Helping: Cooperative and empathetic jobs like teaching and coaching
- Enterprising/Persuading: Leadership roles to drive decisions and manage projects
- Conventional/Organizing: Work needing accuracy like data or process management
Understanding the type of work that aligns with your personality type can help you choose jobs that will provide the most fulfillment—and help you communicate why you’re a good match for an open position.
The quick quiz consists of a series of statements. You read each one and select how strongly you agree with it on a scale of one to five.
Best suited for: New college graduates and career changers
Pricing: Free
7. ColorCode Personality Assessment
The ColorCode Personality Assessment helps you understand your motivations and how they impact the way you interact with people personally, professionally, and socially.
Unlike many other quizzes, which focus on behavior, this assessment focuses on what drives you and how this affects your strengths and limitations. Once you understand the four color groupings, you can also start to understand your coworkers' motives and shape your interactions with them accordingly.
The assessment determines your core motivation, which falls into one of four groups:
- Red/Power: People gifted with vision and leadership and motivated by power
- Blue/Intimacy: Loyal and sincere people driven to connect closely with others
- White/Peace: Calm and balanced, these individuals work to resolve conflict
- Yellow/Fun: These optimistic and enthusiastic individuals seek joy and spontaneity
The free version of this test asks you to select words and behaviors that describe you as a child because the theory is that your core motivators are stable throughout your life. Note: you will need to input your name, email address, and zip code to receive your results.
Best suited for: Current job applicants and those wanting to achieve a deeper understanding of themselves and their coworkers.
Pricing: Free, but you can upgrade to the full version with a 14+ page report for $39.95.
How to use workplace personality tests
Personality tests offer the best of both worlds—they start off as fun quizzes that translate into a deep understanding of your colleagues, managers, and direct reports.
Use your workplace personality test results to:
- Improve collaboration: Workplace personality tests can reveal team members’ communication styles and preferences. Use them to create intentional groupings for team-building activities or to leverage individual strengths to improve team performance. For example, you might ensure teams have a balance of extroverts and introverts, or big-picture thinkers and detail-oriented individuals.
- Assign roles: Understanding employees’ personalities can help you match their skills with specific job responsibilities. For example, say you run a software development team that’s working on a new mobile app project. If you discover a certain employee is a detail-oriented analytical thinker who prefers working alone, you might assign them the role of quality assurance (QA) tester.
- Highlight skills: When applying to new jobs, refer to your personality test results to decide which soft skills to highlight on your resume. Look for personality traits that demonstrate you’re the right fit for the position. For example, for a project management role, you might highlight your leadership and problem-solving skills.
Pro Tip: Whether you’re applying for a new role or seeking a promotion, highlighting how you’re a skill match can cinch the deal.
To translate test results and insights into tangible career paths, plug them into Teal’s Resume Skills Management feature. With Teal, you can take the strengths outlined and highlight them on your resume so they align with every unique job you apply for.
Take the Work Style Assessment
Knowing your personality type is an important step in your journey to building your dream career. Teal's Work Style Assessment helps you build a bigger-picture understanding of your natural tendencies in the workplace so you can identify your strengths, optimize your work environment, and improve your professional relationships.
Knowing your personality type is an important step in your journey to building your dream career. Teal's Work Style Assessment helps you build a bigger-picture understanding of your natural tendencies in the workplace so you can identify your strengths, optimize your work environment, and improve your professional relationships.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best personality test for the workplace?
If you're looking for a comprehensive understanding of your professional behavior and strengths, the Teal Work Style Assessment is the best personality test for the workplace. Teal can help you align your roles and responsibilities with your natural tendencies for greater job satisfaction and productivity.
Are personality tests legal for employment?
Yes, personality tests are legal for employment, but they must comply with anti-discrimination laws. They should be job-related and consistent with business necessity. Employers must ensure the tests don’t unfairly disadvantage any group of people. Used correctly, personality assessments can be a valuable tool for hiring and team building, provided they are administered fairly and ethically.
How do you do a personality test for a job?
To do a personality test for a job, first choose a reputable test like Teal's Work Styles Assessment, MBTI, or DISC. Complete the assessment online, ensuring you answer honestly to get accurate insights into your work preferences and strengths.
What is the 4-color personality test for work?
The 4-color personality test categorizes people into four color-coded types: Blue, Green, Gold, and Orange. Each color represents a set of traits. For instance, Blues are empathetic and cooperative, Greens are analytical and logical, Golds are organized and detail-oriented, while Oranges are dynamic and adventurous. This test helps teams understand diverse working styles, fostering better collaboration and communication.
What are the 4 personality traits or types at work?
The four primary personality types in the workplace are often categorized as Analytical, Driver, Amiable, and Expressive. Analyticals are detail-oriented and logical, Drivers are results-focused and decisive, Amiables are supportive and cooperative, and Expressives are enthusiastic and creative. Recognizing these types helps in assigning roles that align with individual strengths, boosting team efficiency and harmony.
