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The personality part of your hiring test: what it is and how to answer it

The timed test has right answers. The personality questionnaire that comes with it does not. Nobody can sell you the correct answers because there are none. Here is what each one measures and what actually helps.

Updated October 13, 2026 · by TimedPrep

Why it is there

Employers who buy a cognitive test usually buy it as part of a package. The cognitive part estimates how quickly you learn. The personality part describes how you tend to work: with people or alone, steadily or in bursts, by the rules or around them. The employer compares both with a profile it has set for the job.

That is the first thing to understand: the "right" profile is different for every role and you cannot see it. A sales role may favor one pattern and an audit role nearly the opposite.

Wonderlic Select: motivation and personality

Wonderlic Select has three sections. After the 12-minute cognitive test come two untimed ones (Wonderlic candidate FAQ):

• Motivation: 58 items. According to the instructions in Wonderlic's sample assessment, you see sets of three work activities, choose the one you would most like to do, then your favorite of the remaining two. You are told not to consider whether you have the training for the activity or what it pays; only how much you would like doing it.
• Personality: 150 statements. For each statement you answer Agree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, or Disagree. You must respond to every statement. It is not timed but "typically takes about 15 minutes", and you can go back and review your answers.

The whole assessment takes about 35 minutes. Wonderlic's instructions for the personality section are plain: respond candidly, and do not choose a response because it describes the way you might like to be.

What comes out of it? Wonderlic's candidate report, which some candidates receive, describes five "natural tendencies" (helpful, dependable, outgoing, open-minded, composed) and six "personal drivers" (clerical, service, persuasive, creative, hands-on, analytical). Wonderlic says none of them is good or bad. The employer sees how your pattern lines up with the job's profile, combined with the cognitive result.

PI Behavioral Assessment

The Predictive Index's Behavioral Assessment is the shortest of the three. It is an untimed, free-choice checklist that the publisher says takes about six minutes.

• You are shown a list of adjectives (86 of them, according to the publisher's help pages) and asked to select the ones that describe how you are expected to behave at work.
• Then you see the same list again and select the ones you would really use to describe yourself.

There is no minimum or maximum number of words to tick. The result is a pattern on four factors: dominance (drive to influence events), extraversion (drive for social interaction), patience (drive for consistency and stability) and formality (drive to follow rules and structure). From the pattern the software assigns one of 17 reference profiles. The employer compares your pattern with a target range it set for the job.

The publisher's blog says that neither the behavioral nor the cognitive assessment is a test you pass or fail, and it advises employers against cut-off scores.

Criteria: the tests that travel with the CCAT

Criteria sells employers a menu of assessments, and an employer can put several into one session. If your invitation says the session takes 30 to 45 minutes, the 15-minute CCAT is not the only thing in it. The personality tests Criteria lists (Criteria personality tests) include:

• Employee Personality Profile (EPP). 140 items, about 10 minutes, measuring 12 traits: achievement, assertiveness, competitiveness, conscientiousness, cooperativeness, extroversion, managerial, motivation, openness, patience, self-confidence and stress tolerance (EPP page). The employer gets a percentile for each trait and a match score against benchmark profiles for specific jobs.
• Criteria Personality Inventory (CPI). Based on the "Big Five": agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness and stress tolerance (CPI page).
• Role-specific profiles for sales and customer service jobs.

Criteria's pages say the same thing as the others: "There are no right or wrong answers on personality tests." Which of these your employer chose, if any, we cannot tell you; the invitation or the first screen of the session lists the assessments. Criteria also offers a free practice personality assessment if you want to see the style.

How to answer: the honest version

Some sites sell guides to the "correct" personality answers. We do not, for three reasons that are also the best advice we can give.

1. You do not know the target. The employer's profile is specific to the role and hidden from you. Guessing it means betting your application on a stereotype of the job.
2. Inconsistency shows. A questionnaire with 140 or 150 statements asks about the same tendency many times in different words. Wonderlic's own sample includes both "I am quite comfortable talking to a room full of people" and a reversed statement about not liking to talk in front of groups. If you agree with both, your answers contradict each other. A person who answers as themselves is consistent without trying.
3. You have to do the job afterward. If the profile you invented gets you hired into a role that needs the opposite of how you work, that is not a win.

What does help:

• Answer as your working self. Not you at a party, not you on your worst day. Think about how you behave on a normal day at work or in your studies.
• Go with the first honest reaction. Do not deliberate over each statement. On Wonderlic's 150 statements that is about six seconds each for the typical 15 minutes.
• Use the middle option when it is true, not as a hiding place. "Neither agree nor disagree" on most statements gives the employer a blank profile.
• Do not present yourself as flawless. Everyone is sometimes late, sometimes irritated, sometimes unsure. Claiming otherwise on every such statement looks less believable, not more.
• Take it when you are calm, ideally in the same sitting as the cognitive test but after a breath. These sections are untimed. There is no reason to rush them because the timed part went badly.
• On the PI checklist, read both questions carefully. The first is about what others expect of you; the second is about you. People who miss the difference tick the same words twice.

How much does it count?

It depends on the employer, and the publishers push in the same direction: use it as one input. Wonderlic combines the three sections into one job-specific result. The Predictive Index tells employers that assessment results should be additional data points in a broad set. In practice the personality profile is often used to shape the interview: if your pattern differs from the target on one factor, expect a question about it. That is a good thing to prepare for: have an example ready of how you handle the kind of work that does not come naturally to you.

The part practice can help with is the timed test. That is what TimedPrep is for: a free full-length timed test for each exam, no sign-up, with your score and a breakdown by question type.

Related guides

• The PI Cognitive Assessment: 50 questions, 12 minutes, nine question types
• The Wonderlic test: 50 questions, 12 minutes, and what to do about it
• What happens after you submit the test
• Test-day checklist: the 20 minutes before you click Start
• Which test did they send me? How to tell from the invitation