Personality Profiling: An Introduction

Personality profiling, also called behavioural profiling or personality testing, is a field that covers a vast range of tools and solutions: everything from technical and clinical tools to business-oriented solutions. Some of these use hundreds of questions to measure dozens of variables, others simply identify a person as belonging to a certain category. However they work, though, all these approaches offer the same underlying solution: they identify features of a personality in a way that's intended to be useful in understanding and predicting their behaviour.

What Does a Profiler Measure?

'Personality' is a word whose meaning can be hard to pin down. In common use, for instance, most people would consider factors like intelligence or mathematical aptitude to be part of an individual's personality, but factors like those lie outside the role of a personality profile in the sense we mean it here.

Instead, we're concerned with modelling the ways a person tends to behave, and the underlying traits that describe those patterns. Examples of the kinds of things we might measure would be assertiveness, self-control, decisiveness, caution, and so on. That's a part of the reason we often prefer to talk about 'behavioural' rather than 'personality' profiling, to make the distinction clear.

The Advantages of Profiling

It's not hard to imagine the kinds of advantages this sort of profiling can bring. If we have an idea of the kind of motivations and drives that lie under a person's approach to their work, it's possible to:

• Understand what makes a person act in the ways that they do.
• Motivate them to take on new and challenging tasks in their own terms.
• Predict how they're likely to react in different situations.
• Select the best individuals for particular tasks or roles.

These aren't just theoretical benefits: they can be realized in practice but a sufficiently powerful model - and even automated in some cases. For example, see this factfile for details about how the Discus tool can handle the selection process.

Profiling in Practice

There are plenty of general advantages to profiling of this kind, but what specific uses can it be put to? Well, take a look at this list for a selection (you can click on any of the items shown here for more information on the topic in question).

• Recruitment
• Assessment
• Cultural Integration
• Redeployment
• Addressing Specific Problems
• Career Development
• Negotiation Management

Different Types of Profiling

There are various different approaches to profiling, and different models used to describe the ways a person works. Axiom's Discus profiler uses the DISC model to describe behaviour and personality in a way that's specifically designed for business use. Here's how it compares with some of the other approaches:

• It's behavioural: that is, it focuses on observing and describing behaviours rather than being based on a specific psychological theory.
• It's continuous: that is, it doesn't split people into a few fixed categories (but it does recognise certain common types, as you can see here).
• It's specific: that is, it doesn't try to model every aspect of the personality, but focuses on features that are relevant in a business setting.

You can find out much more about DISC theory and practice in our extensive DISC Reference Library.

If you want to see how DISC is put into practice, take a look at our Discus integrated profiler.