Misuse of Workplace Application
When used appropriately, behavioral assessments can help individuals and teams better understand their strengths and communication styles. But when misused, behavioral assessments can introduce bias into hiring decisions and even reduce workplace diversity.
It is possible to identify the existence of certain disabilities that the test taker may have depending on the behavioral assessment. For example, answers to questions like “You are always cheerful” or “You have confidence in yourself” can be linked to depression. When used in a hiring context, this type of survey contributes to the discrimination of people with disabilities and can even lead to lawsuits.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), employers cannot ask potential job candidates to take a medical exam. But some personality tests, like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), can provide information indicative of a mental illness diagnosis. In one case, the court of appeals determined that administering the MMPI to qualify someone for a promotion violated the ADA.
Even an unbiased behavioral assessment can be turned into an inappropriate hiring tool if administered incorrectly. Let’s say an HR Director distributes a behavioral test based only on one type of the protected classes like race, religion, or age. Then, bias is introduced outside of the function of the behavioral assessment and can land the organization in hot water.
Research
- Built with Workplace Focus: Developed in the 1970s by an interdisciplinary team of academics and business leaders, PDP’s original assessments were grounded in large-scale studies of thousands of working adults and designed to measure five core traits: Dominance, Extroversion, Pace, Conformity, and Logic.
- Gold-Standard Statistical Rigor: PDP Global validates its behavioral assessments using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) (a higher standard than Exploratory Factor Analysis) to ensure each trait is distinct, consistent, and predictive of performance. Few competitors complete this level of testing, and PDP has repeated CFA validation three times to prove reliability and consistency.
- Ongoing Validity Study Since 2021: PDP Global launched its most recent long-term CFA study in 2021 to evaluate updated assessment language for greater accuracy. Results confirmed the original 4-factor model plus Logic as a distinct trait, demonstrating the assessment is reliable, valid, and reproducible.
- 39,000+ Case Study Sample: Our core research was validated against a massive sample of 39,000 working adults (as opposed to undergraduate students), ensuring the data reflects real-world workplace dynamics rather than controlled lab settings.
- Psychologist-Recognized Research Standards: PDP Global’s assessments are developed with exceptional scientific rigor and have been endorsed by professional psychologists who vouch for the integrity of our methodology.
Zero Bias
- EEOC and ADA Compliant: Our assessments meet and exceed the standards set by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Americans with Disabilities Act for pre-employment selection, following the Employment Test and Selection Procedures policy that:
“Employers should ensure that tests and selection procedures are not adopted casually by managers who know little about these processes. A test or selection procedure can be an effective management tool, but no test or selection procedure should be implemented without an understanding of its effectiveness and limitations for the organization, its appropriateness for a specific job, and whether it can be appropriately administered and scored.”
- Independently Audited for Fairness: We conducted a comprehensive research study to ensure there is no "disparate impact" or adverse bias against protected groups.
- Designed to Prevent Biased Hiring: Assessments are carefully constructed to support objective, non-discriminatory hiring decisions without unintentionally disadvantaging protected groups.
- Certified Administration & Interpretation: PDP offers four EEOC-compliant certification programs to ensure assessments are properly applied with full understanding of effectiveness, limitations, and job relevance.
- Trusted Legal Confidence: Employment lawyers have expressed their confidence that PDP assessments align with U.S. state and federal regulations, helping organizations make compliant, unbiased hiring decisions.
PDP Behavioral Assessment Employment Use Cases
PDP’s behavioral assessments can be used to solve a range of challenges facing your organization such as hiring and retention, team communication, and leadership/management development.
Hiring and Retention
Selecting and keeping talent is a massive challenge. Bad hires are costly, and bringing the wrong person to the team can hurt morale.
PDP helps you find the right person for the right role. A robust JobScan report looks at your top performers and helps you identify the traits that lead to success, along with the behaviors you feel are most important at this time for the position. It then provides you with a list of keywords you can use to create job descriptions and advertisements that attract the right applicants, supplying you with a steady pipeline of strong candidates.
Next, the candidates complete the Applicant ProScan behavioral assessment quickly in 5.1 minutes on average to obtain an inventory of their individual behavioral traits. You can easily see who has the traits that are most consistent with success in your teams. To ensure hiring the best, JobScan’s Interview Guide prompts behavioral interviewing questions that are objectively derived based on applicant’s traits compared to the required position traits.
Real-World Application
Companies around the world use our assessments to improve hiring and retention outcomes. For example, a US call center that used PDP assessments saw the following benefits:
- 10% increase in screening capacity
- 10% increase in length of employee tenure
- Recruiting staff needed reduced by 3.5 full-time positions
“The results of the PDP solution implemented have surpassed our initial expectations. We have been able to tap into new labor markets and realize greater recruiting success in a period of very aggressive growth. We look forward to expanding the role PDP plays in our organization beyond recruiting. If you hire with any sort of regularity, you need this tool.” —Call Center Human Resource Manager
Team Communication
Strong performance requires your people to pull together. PDP helps align your people with your team culture and build communication skills that enable them to solve your toughest business problems.
Our TeamScan tool shows you the unique dynamics of your team—their traits, energy levels, and motivators. It also allows you to find effective leaders and put your team members in positions where they’ll thrive.
Real-World Application
Our system has helped numerous organizations build high performing teams, improve their culture, and become more effective. For example, Cure 4 the Kids Foundation turned their culture around from one that was conflict-avoidant to one that is transparent and open by using TeamScan. Their employees became more engaged, built trust, and experienced a boost in morale across the board. The benefits they saw include:
Our system has helped numerous organizations build high performing teams, improve their culture, and become more effective. For example, Cure 4 the Kids Foundation turned their culture around from one that was conflict-avoidant to one that is transparent and open by using TeamScan. Their employees became more engaged, built trust, and experienced a boost in morale across the board. The benefits they saw include:
- Ranked 32 on the 50 Best Nonprofits to Work for in the U.S.
- Ranked 2,603 on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Small Businesses
- Earned Gold Standard award from the Joint Commission for four consecutive inspections over 13 years
“Investing in our leadership team has created incredibly engaged and inspired teams in each department, working collaboratively.” —Annette Logan, Cure 4 the Kids Foundation Founder/CEO
Leadership and Management Development
Leadership is the art of building an effective team culture. It requires both strategic vision and the ability to rally teams around that vision. Without effective leaders, your people become disengaged, make poor decisions, and leave to find work elsewhere.
PDP gives you the insight you need to lead effectively and build a high-performance work culture. It helps you understand the traits that make effective employees in your company so you can hire more of them, what motivates your employees so you can optimize productivity, and also helps you shift the company culture so your employees are more engaged.
Our system has helped businesses of every size identify opportunities for improvement in their leadership styles and understand how to remediate those.
Real-World Application
For example, PDP provided the support Rose Chauffeured Transportation needed to establish effective and authentic communications with the company and ultimately build morale. The measurable benefits include:
- 44% reduction in employee turnover
- 75% growth in sales
- Employee morale is at an all-time high
"I worked 34 years in the corporate world before embarking on an entrepreneurial career. I knew managing a small business would be a challenge. I’ve used consultants successfully. Don Crosby of PDP Global is absolutely the best at handling and dissecting the faulty communication dynamics of any business and improving hiring procedures. He never offends, and his positive approach removes the barriers and obstacles we all encounter. The results have been no less than amazing.” —H.A. Thompson, Rose Chauffeured Transportation President and Founder
Big Five Personality Tests
The Big Five personality test is a proposed taxonomy of personality traits. It’s one of the most widely used taxonomies for understanding personality in current psychological science and is well-validated by numerous studies.
The Big Five model also has been useful for helping understand how personality can be related to health and mental health.
While personality tests that use the Big Five model are useful for understanding personality from a psychological point of view, it’s not clear that they can be usefully applied to work contexts.
It wasn’t designed specifically to predict job performance or help recruiters find ideal candidates. In one study of over 250 salespeople, it was found that self-efficacy was a better predictor of job performance than the Big 5 test. The personality traits measured are too general to be applied to specific roles.
In contrast, PDP Global’s assessments were designed specifically for application in a work context. Especially in the case of hiring, the JobScan module benchmarks the desired traits for a particular position, which the hiring professional can then compare individual applicant ProScan results to.
