DISC and Other Personality Tests: Which One Is Right for Your Selection Process?

DISC and Other Personality Styles: How to Choose the Best Test

When it comes to hiring talent, technical skills and experience aren't everything. The way a person communicates, makes decisions, or reacts to stress can make a huge difference in their success within the team. That's why personality tests have become an essential tool in recruitment processes. But which one should you choose? DISC, the Big Five, MBTI, or another?

In this article, we explore the most widely used personality styles, their differences, and how to choose the most useful test depending on the role, the environment, and the type of company.

What Is a Personality Style Test?

A personality style test evaluates behavior patterns, attitudes, emotional reactions, and ways of interacting with the environment. Its goal is not to label a person, but to understand how they might act in a work environment. These insights allow for more strategic hiring decisions, reduced turnover, and the building of balanced teams.

Unlike psychometric tests focused on cognitive abilities, personality tests help predict how a candidate will integrate into a company's culture and dynamics.

DISC: Fast, Functional, and Useful for Teams

The DISC model classifies people into four predominant styles: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance. It's not about pigeonholing people, but about identifying which style predominates and how it interacts with others.

• Dominance (D): Results-oriented, direct, competitive. Useful in sales or leadership.

• Influence (I): Sociable, persuasive, enthusiastic. Ideal for public relations or customer service roles.

• Steadiness (S): Collaborative, patient, reliable. Brings balance to high-pressure environments.

• Compliance (C): Meticulous, analytical, rule-focused. Valuable in quality, finance, or control.

Evalart offers DISC-style tests that can be adapted to the type of profile you're looking for and produce clear results about how a person tends to behave at work. You can learn more about our catalog here.

The Big Five: The Most Scientific and In-Depth Approach

Also known as OCEAN, the Big Five measures five key dimensions:

1. Openness to experience: Curiosity, creativity, mental flexibility.

2. Conscientiousness: Organization, punctuality, discipline.

3. Extraversion: Social energy, enthusiasm, need for external stimulation.

4. Agreeableness: Empathy, cooperation, a conciliatory attitude.

5. Neuroticism: Tendency toward stress, anxiety, negative emotions.

This test is widely used in psychology and multinational companies for its scientific rigor and ability to predict workplace behavior. For example, a high level of conscientiousness tends to correlate with strong performance in tasks with little supervision, while low agreeableness can predict conflicts in collaborative teams.

Ideal for leadership positions, team management, or roles where emotional judgment and self-control are key.

MBTI: Popular, but with Reservations

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of the best-known tests, although not always the most rigorous. It classifies people into 16 personality types based on 4 dichotomies:

• Extroverted (E) vs. Introverted (I)

• Sensing (S) vs. Intuitive (N)

• Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)

• Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P)

While it can be useful for fostering self-awareness or improving team communication, its use in selection processes is debated. Its results are often not stable over time and don't have as much scientific backing as the Big Five.

That's why many companies choose to use it only during onboarding or team-development phases.

Which Test Should You Use?

It depends on the goal. Here are some common scenarios:

• You need speed in a high-volume process: Use DISC. It's quick to apply, easy to interpret, and very useful for defining communication or leadership styles.

• You want an in-depth understanding of how a person will work on a team: Use the Big Five. Its wealth of data makes it possible to identify strengths and risks in detail.

• You want to improve your current team's culture: MBTI can help foster empathy and respect for different styles, although more for internal purposes

Practical Examples of Application in Recruitment

Imagine you're hiring for three different profiles. Let's look at which test would be most useful in each case:

1. B2B sales executive: The DISC style can help you identify a profile with high Dominance and Influence. This means the person is competitive, makes decisions quickly, and finds it easy to connect with other people, key qualities for closing sales.

2. Financial analyst: Here, the Big Five is more accurate. You're looking for someone with high conscientiousness, low neuroticism, and good openness to experience. This indicates they'll be able to handle pressure, be meticulous with numbers, and adapt to new tools.

3. Remote team coordinator: It can be useful to apply both DISC and the Big Five. The first will help you understand their leadership style and how they communicate, while the second will provide data on their self-management ability and resilience.

Online Personality Tests: Fast, Convenient, and Effective

A major advantage today is that you no longer need to coordinate in-person sessions or apply paper-based tests. With platforms like Evalart, you can apply personality tests 100% online, including DISC and the Big Five.

This allows you to:

• Reduce evaluation times.

• Apply tests to many candidates simultaneously.

• View results clearly.

• Make decisions based on comparable data.

If you haven't tried it yet, you can request a free demo here, and in the meantime we invite you to check out our features.

Personality Also Matters

It's not about choosing the "best" test overall, but the most useful one for the type of decision you need to make. A well-applied personality test can help you:

• Predict a candidate's cultural fit.

• Identify leadership styles.

• Build balanced teams.

• Reduce turnover caused by profile mismatch.

At Evalart, we offer a wide variety of personality tests that you can customize to fit your processes. DISC, the Big Five, hybrid tests… all available online and ready to help you hire better.

Ready to improve your processes with more human, more accurate evaluations? Contact us today.