Choosing job-related personality traits: Developing valid personality-oriented job analysis

Although personality assessment has proven utility in pre-employment testing, little is known about how one should choose the personality traits that are most job-related. We developed a Personality-oriented Job Analysis (POJA) process for choosing job-related personality traits. We evaluated this process using 15 expert raters and approximately 330 medical students who each completed six different “jobs” in which their performance was evaluated. There was consistency across experts in POJA ratings of the job-relevance of personality traits. Also, POJA ratings of the personality traits correlated with the actual criterion-validity of the traits. Traits that received the highest POJA ratings tended to predict job performance. To our knowledge, this is the first published work to present evidence of the criterion-validity of POJA.

► Personality assessment is essential in pre-employment testing.
► Little is known about how one should choose, a priori, personality traits that are most job-related.
► We developed a method for choosing those traits that will be most related to performance in a given job.
► Evidence from 300 participants with six different jobs supported our method.
► This is first such method with evidence of criterion-related validity.