The MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) assessment is a popular tool for individuals who want to know more about their personalities. Over the years, the MBTI assessment has made its way into organizations’ hiring decisions, but it’s not optimized for recruiting and lacks the scientific rigor for employee development purposes. This article compares the Wonderlic and MBTI tests, pointing out the shortcomings from a hiring and employee development perspective.
What is Wonderlic, and how does it work?
Wonderlic is a talent assessment platform that evaluates cognitive ability, personality, and motivation to give recruiters, hiring managers, and employees highly predictive insights. Our multi-measure pre-hire assessment uses leading industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology to evaluate whether workers are a good match for the job. In other words, it measures whether candidates can do the job, if they want to do the job, and how will they do the job? These assessments, combined, provide highly predictive insights into on-the-job performance, team fit, satisfaction, and retention.
When it comes to developing employees, workers can use Wonderlic to quickly understand which aspects of their role come naturally — and which require more effort. With guided, self-paced learning, employees can immediately incorporate these results into their day-to-day work to learn and grow in their careers.
What is MBTI, and how does it work?
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) measures personality preferences, exploring how individuals perceive the world and make decisions. MBTI places individuals into one of 16 personality types based on four categories — for example, extraversion versus introversion and sensing versus intuition. The four classifications create a combination of letters that signify someone’s unique personality type, e.g., ENFP.
Unlike Wonderlic, which focuses on areas that relate to job performance, MBTI focuses on personality types, offering insight into personal inclinations and how people interact. While invaluable for personal development and team building, MBTI doesn’t directly assess job skills or performance. For hiring managers focused on gauging a candidate’s job suitability and cognitive abilities, Wonderlic provides targeted insights into job performance that MBTI doesn’t — and isn’t designed to.
Side-by-Side Comparison
Predictive Accuracy
Wonderlic
MBTI
Why is this important?
- Assessments with high levels of predictive accuracy provide better long-term outcomes — including employee performance, satisfaction, and retention — than those with low predictive accuracy and little to no job specificity.
- Success starts with matching the tool to its purpose — some assessment tools are not designed for hiring.
How is Wonderlic different?
- Wonderlic is validated for both hiring and employee development.
- Science has shown that multi-measure assessments are the most predictive of on-the-job performance. Wonderlic’s multi-measure assessment evaluates cognitive ability, personality, and motivation to provide a single score for easier, faster, and more effective hiring decisions. Wonderlic uses the same test for all candidates, and scores are weighted against detailed job and role requirements.
- The Wonderlic Jobs Engine is the only database on the market that provides off-the-shelf scoring profiles covering all existing and emerging jobs. This means you and your team get the most accurate information about the role you’re hiring for — without spending weeks or months building customized job profiles or guessing which features are most important.
- Wonderlic’s assessment doesn’t stop at the hiring decision. Wonderlic also gives employees job-specific insights into their strengths and weaknesses, providing tips and tools they can easily incorporate into their day-to-day work to improve performance and grow in their careers.
Ease of Use
Wonderlic MBTI
Why is this important?
- Reports must be easy to understand and relevant to specific jobs for effective employee selection and development. Otherwise, recruiters and employees won’t know how to use the results, what to focus on, or where they’re going, resulting in low product utilization and poor outcomes.
- If the results of an employee assessment are challenging to interpret or inconsistent, recruiters are more likely to make biased, inequitable, and unreliable decisions — leading to poor hires and, in some cases, legal consequences.
- If a lot of complexity is required to interpret test results, organizations may need to pay for additional training or certifications before recruiters and employees can use the assessment.
How is Wonderlic different?
- Wonderlic assessments do not bucket candidates or employees into specific “types”; instead, Wonderlic provides a score based on the job’s required knowledge, skills, and abilities.
- When it comes to employee development, Wonderlic provides insights specific to an employee’s job. It also requires little to no managerial oversight, giving employees the agency and ability to improve at their own pace.
- Wonderlic provides a single score for reviewers and employees that weighs cognitive ability, personality, and motivation against job-specific requirements.
- When deciding between candidates, recruiters can view an applicant’s overall score or dive into the specific scores of any single component of our multi-measure assessment, easily seeing how a candidate scored and why.
Scientific Quality
Wonderlic MBTI
Why is this important?
- The most effective talent assessments are backed by leading industrial organizational psychology and science. Multi-measure assessments that include cognitive ability, personality, and motivation have been shown to be the most predictive of on-the-job performance.
- Maintaining scientific integrity for each assessment is crucial for reducing bias and maximizing effectiveness, but it requires constant updating as new science becomes available. Providers with many assessments are at a much higher risk of falling behind on the latest science, technical advancements, and job relevance.
How is Wonderlic different?
- Wonderlic relies on the combined predictive power of cognitive ability, personality, and motivation to understand whether a candidate can do the job, how they’ll do the job, and if they want to do it.
- Our cognitive ability test is widely recognized as the industry standard for aptitude testing.
- Wonderlic uses the Big Five personality test, one of the most trusted pre-employment personality test frameworks. This model measures an individual’s Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Openness to Experience, and Emotional Stability — the dimensions of personality deemed most comprehensive by I/O research
Test-Taker Experience
Wonderlic MBTI
Why is this important?
- Providing feedback to candidates offers them value post-application and helps them gain strategic self-awareness.
- Allowing employees to own their development after onboarding empowers them to take ownership of their careers. This also helps them gain the buy-in to improve their performance, reducing the managerial overhead of providing day-to-day coaching while enhancing employee engagement and productivity.
How is Wonderlic different?
- After completing the Wonderlic Select assessment, candidates automatically receive a detailed feedback report that provides valuable insights into their essential traits, natural tendencies, and personal drivers.
- Whether candidates get the role or not, they will walk away with deeper insights into themselves that will help them in the future.
- Wonderlic’s employee assessments and self-led development tools give employees a user-friendly way to grow and improve while taking the burden of development off HR teams and managers.
Experience the Most Predictive Talent Assessment on the Market
Help your team find top candidates faster using clear and unbiased insights from our multi-measure pre-hire assessment, Wonderlic Select. Select uses leading I/O science to provide results that are easy for you and your team to understand without expensive certifications.
Wonderlic Develop also gives your employees a personalized, role-specific roadmap for development tailored to their unique roles. These insights can help them make immediate improvements in their daily tasks, making professional development an integral part of the daily routine — minimizing the burdens on managers while maximizing growth.
