How to identify red flags and cultural misfits with Personality Tests

Personality tests are considered an important part of the hiring process as companies look to hire the best talent available. Every organization aims to ensure that its hiring is quick and efficient. However, for this to happen, companies need to follow a holistic approach. Interviews should focus on how talented an employee is and how they will conduct themselves in a crisis situation.

Personality tests are a great way of identifying certain red flags in these tests that need to be identified and corrected before they affect the sanctity of the recruitment process. 

According to a survey, hiring employees who don’t fit the cultural values of the company can lead to disastrous consequences for the company, such as:

• 41 per cent of recruitment costs wasted
• 53  per cent of training expenses lost
• 36  per cent decrease in productivity
• 24  per cent negative impact on the bottom line
• 21  per cent increase in employee turnover

This is why it is important to have personality assessments and monitor them from time to time to identify process inefficiencies. However, before we delve into the topic of identifying red flags and cultural misfits in personality assessments, we need to understand what they are and why companies prefer this.

What is Personality Tests 

Personality Tests are a set of assessments used to determine an individual’s character, behavior, and traits. These tests are used as an extension of the technical interviews, which are used to judge the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. They are also helpful in assessing the candidate’s soft skills.

The main aim of such assessments is to test how an employee reacts to different workplace situations. While an employee could be talented in his work, he could struggle to exhibit the same skills under pressure situations.

Also Read: Why Hiring DevOps Engineers Is Hard

Identifying Red Flags with Personality Tests 

Low conscientiousness

One of the challenges that companies face after hiring an employee is when they are talented but not conscientious. Being talented is not enough, as employees should also be organized, dependable, disciplined, and goal-focused. However, under traditional interview setups, recruiters end up focusing too much on core skills while ignoring or failing to identify red flags. This is where Personality Tests can be used to identify the conscientiousness of the candidate.

Also Read: How To Reduce Time-to-Hire with IaaS

A candidate with a high conscientiousness tend to:

• Meet deadlines
• Follow the rules/procedures
• Stay organized
• Plan ahead
• Be reliable and consistent

While a candidate with a high conscientiousness tend to:

• Procrastinates
• Is disorganized or scattered
• Misses deadlines
• Is it less reliable or consistent
• May avoid structure or routine

Also Read: The Rise of Remote Hiring And How IaaS Fits In

High aggressiveness or low agreeableness

In a workplace, employees need to function as a team. In such scenarios, there are bound to be incidents where there will be conflicts, differences of opinion, and potential friction. How an employee resolves these conflicts, however, tells a lot about their personality. Such skills are even more useful when organizations are hiring for leadership and cross-functional roles.  

Under these circumstances, employees need to display low aggressiveness and low agreeableness. So, how do we identify red flags in personality tests if the candidates exhibit high aggressiveness or low agreeableness?

Here’s how to identify these red flags:

• Ask them to give feedback and assess how respectful they are while agreeing or disagreeing with a certain view.
• Conduct reference checks in their previous organizations to assess employees.
• Analyze their behaviors in group settings to see if the candidates are interruptive, dominant, or dismissive.

Also Read: Biggest Hiring Challenges in 2025 and How IaaS Can Help

Extreme introversion or extroversion

Being an extrovert or introvert is not bad in any sense. However, when a candidate exhibits extreme extroversion or introversion, they can create issues within the workplace and can also cause cultural issues within the company. So, while interviewing, a recruiter has to analyze whether the candidate’s extroversion or introversion aligns with the company’s values.

The problems of extreme extroversion are:

• Talking over others in meetings or dominating conversations
• Prioritizing speed over depth—“thinking out loud” without processing
• Struggling with tasks that require deep, solo focus (e.g., writing, coding)
• Constantly seeking stimulation—get bored or distracted easily
• Missing social cues (interrupting, lack of active listening)

The problems of extreme introversion are:

• Avoiding group discussions or hesitate to speak up—even when they have good input
• Struggling with networking, collaboration, or client-facing roles
• Resisting frequent or spontaneous communication (like Slack chats or Zooms)
• Be slow in responding to fast-moving environments
• Appearing disengaged or unapproachable (even if they’re not)

Also Read: The Ultimate Guide to assess Software Developers

Low emotional stability

One of the most underrated skills in the workplace is emotional Intelligence. Emotional Intelligence includes four components on which it is measured. These four components are as follows:

• Self-awareness 
• Self-control 
• Empathy 
• Social skills

A person with high emotional stability is a boon for a workplace as they can stay calm under pressure situations and are adept at resolving conflicts if and when they arise. However, a person with lower emotional Intelligence can lead to a workplace becoming toxic.

Employees with low emotional stability may:

• Overreact to criticism or minor setbacks
• Frequently express worry, fear, or insecurity
• Struggle with pressure, deadlines, or ambiguity
• Blame others or catastrophize problems
• Be inconsistent in behavior or performance (good one day, disengaged the next)
• Show signs of burnout or absenteeism more easily
• Create a negative emotional climate—drama, tension, defensiveness

Also Read: Why Enterprise Companies are Shifting to IaaS for hiring top talent

Dishonesty in responses

Well, several times, the candidate tries to make his CV and interview answers as good as possible. However, a problem arises when the candidates start being dishonest in their responses. This is why modern interview assessments have included built-in features that can identify these red flags. However, these checks are not foolproof, and thus, as a recruiter, it is better to look out for candidates who exhibit such behaviors. Such candidates try to present an idealized version of themselves and never acknowledge any flaws or weaknesses.

Recruiters can ask subtle questions to see if the candidates are lying. For example, if the candidates suggest that they have never made a mistake in the workplace, which is very unrealistic, another way of doing so is to ask similar questions in different ways to see if the candidates slip up and provide different answers.

Also Read: What is Internal Recruiting and how does it benefit a company?

Cultural Misfit Indicators

Mismatch in values

Any company has certain core beliefs, priorities, and guiding principles under which it functions. So, while conducting interviews, recruiters need to identify candidates whose beliefs, priorities, and principles might clash with those of the company. The mismatch of values can lead to poor collaboration, teamwork, friction, motivation, and overall performance.

Using structured interviews is a great way to identify such a mismatch of values. In a structured interview format, every candidate is asked the same questions. While the main advantage of such tests is to eliminate bias in the recruitment process, they can also detect mismatches in values. A good question to ask in a structured interview is:

• “Can you describe a situation where you had to choose between your approach and a directive that aligned with team or company values?”

Under the umbrella of personality assessments, interviewers should tend to structure their questions around the candidate’s claims to check whether there is a difference between their stated values and behavioral tendencies.

Also Read: What are pros and cons of Personality Tests in hiring?

Collaboration vs. independence

Certain issues that recruiters need to focus on while hiring for an interview are how the company wants their individual to function within a team and how they work in an individual capacity. In the long run, both high or low collaboration or high or low independence can have disastrous consequences for a workplace, and only companies that can balance these two aspects succeed in the long run. 

The red flags for both cases are as follows:

For Over-Collaboration:

• Reluctance to take initiative or make decisions independently
• Over-dependence on consensus, leading to delays or diluted accountability

For Over-Independence:

• Poor communication or lack of willingness to integrate with team plans
• Resistance to collaborative tools or team-based processes
• Difficulty accepting feedback or incorporating diverse perspectives

In personality assessments, recruiters should look for qualities such as measure traits like openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness for either collaboration or independence.

Also Read: What is Caring Culture and why it is necessary in the workplace?

Risk tolerance

Decision-making is an important aspect of any employee working in the organization. So, a company should always assess to what extent an employee will take a risk in certain decisions. Risk tolerance can be either good or bad, depending on the company’s own beliefs, values, and core principles. For example, an organization that values innovation and is dynamic will allow its employees to be more risk-taking than an organization that focuses on stability and will ask its employees to be more risk-averse.

Depending on the organization’s needs, recruiters can use the Hogan Personality Inventory or specific Big Five assessments, which have some features to measure risk tolerance. Developed in 1987 by Drs. Joyce Hogan and Robert Hogan, this assessment analyzes how a prospective employee will act in a certain situation. In the Big Five personality tests, the candidate has to read five items and rate them on a scale from one to five. 

Also Read: What are pros and cons of Emotional Intelligence in hiring?

Advantages of using Personality Tests 

Counter bias in the recruitment process 

Various types of biases, such as racial, gender, or disability bias, can infiltrate the hiring process. Over the years, companies have adopted various methods, such as blind CVs, structured interviews, and DEI hiring policies. Personality assessment is another great weapon to further eliminate bias of any kind.

Also Read: What is Salary History and why do companies ask for it?

Better Leadership Skills

Emotional Intelligence plays a key role in strengthening leadership skills. Individuals with high emotional Intelligence are better equipped to understand, inspire, and guide their teams through workplace challenges and successes. They excel at creating positive work environments, resolving conflicts constructively, and making fair, unbiased decisions. One can focus on practicing active listening, promoting open communication, and cultivating greater emotional self-control to enhance leadership abilities.

Also Read: Best Interview as a service platforms in 2025

Makes the workplace less toxic

Utilizing personality assessments during the recruitment process can play a pivotal role in fostering a constructive and cohesive organizational culture. Employees constitute the foundational pillars of any enterprise, and the presence of a toxic work environment can have detrimental consequences, including elevated attrition rates, diminished employee motivation, and the proliferation of counterproductive behaviors such as sycophancy. By implementing personality tests, organizations are better positioned to evaluate candidates’ compatibility with the existing corporate culture, thereby promoting an environment where innovation, diligence, and integrity are consistently encouraged and rewarded.

While personality tests are a great way to identify red flags and cultural misfits, they are not the only tool that will help companies improve their recruitment process. This is where an interview-as-a-service (IaaS) company can be an added advantage for companies looking for the best talent. 

These companies provide end-to-end hiring solutions that companies can use to improve their hiring process, and BarRaiser is one such tool. So, how does the tool work? Firstly, we insert an Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot that integrates into the organization’s Application Tracking System (ATS), negating the need for additional training. 

Also Read: 5 Best Ai interview copilot Software You Must Know About In 2025

Before the interview, our AI Interview Copilot helps the interviewer by asking an appropriate set of questions.  This can be done simply by asking the bot to create a questionnaire by telling it about the role, the number of years of experience, the number of interview rounds, the duration of Interviews, and more. This questionnaire is created in a structured interview format to eliminate bias in the recruitment process.

Our bot records and transcribes the entire conversation during the interview, which helps with post-interview grading. The bot is also programmed to detect discriminatory language if it is used. The use of a structured interview format also helps ensure all the candidates are judged on the same metric, thereby avoiding bias.

After the Interview, the bot asks the recruiters to create a detailed report on the candidate. The bot also creates another report on the interviewer’s conduct, which is shared with the hiring manager and other stakeholders of the recruitment process. 

Using BarRaiser, we guarantee quality hiring that will bolster diversity and inclusion. BarRaiser is the best AI interview platform, featuring structured interviews and tools to ensure quality hiring while eliminating recruitment bias. With BarRaiser’s support, you’ll be well-equipped to build a strong team of sales associates who will drive sales and deliver exceptional customer service.

Companies that want to adopt our tool full-time for their internal teams can take our interviewer training. In this training, we will train your recruiters so that they can learn to operate the tool full-time. We also provide services such as Interview Coaching snippets (our most used feature under interviewer training). In this feature, hiring managers or interviewers record an interview and share a clip with their colleagues requesting feedback. 

In addition, we provide reports on every interview to the hiring managers. Our tool rates the interviewer’s performance based on several metrics. The system analyses interviewers based on multiple parameters, and gives them a rating on previous data, and managers can monitor those metrics and guide so the interviewer’s team can improve their process.