Blog
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A Brief Overview of the DISC Assessment
*This is a single installment in a larger series dedicated to examining some of the most popular, influential, and historically important personality testing models and assessment tools. DISC Assessment is a widely-used behavioral self-testing tool, one that organizations have deployed in an effort to better understand workplace behavior, internal culture, [...]
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A Brief Overview of The Hogan Personality Inventory
*This is a single installment in a larger series dedicated to examining some of the most popular, influential, and historically important personality testing models and assessment tools. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) is an assessment tool that has been used widely in the areas of employment and career development. The [...]
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A Brief Overview of The Wonderlic Test
*This is a single installment in a larger series dedicated to examining some of the most popular, influential, and historically important personality testing models and assessment tools. So far, our series has placed a focus on personality assessment tools. The Wonderlic Test would more accurately be called a cognitive assessment [...]
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A Brief Overview of the Five-Factor Model of Personality
*This is a single installment in a larger series dedicated to examining some of the most popular, influential, and historically important personality testing models and assessment tools. The Five-factor Model of Personality is a highly influential framework for helping us understand human personality. The Five-factor Model (FFM) is based on [...]
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A Brief Overview of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
*This is a single installment in a larger series dedicated to examining some of the most popular, influential, and historically important personality testing models and assessment tools. Any discussion on personality testing and assessment must include an acknowledgement of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), both for its central role in [...]
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Is generational drift impacting your business?
And if so, what can you do about it? We are in the midst of a major generational shift in the American workforce. According to an article from Johns Hopkins University, 19% of today’s workforce is made up of Baby Boomers. Gen X accounts for 35.5% and Millennials occupy 39.4%. [...]
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What Kind of Leader Are You?
Ever wonder what kind of leader you are? Are you the type of leader to forge ahead on an ambitious startup with a small team and a shoestring budget? Or is your leadership style better suited to a highly structured and well-established organization? Do you have the ideal personality to [...]
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Top 10 HR Challenges in 2025
In our most recent article, we discussed some of the leading HR trends we expect to see in the coming year and beyond. We also acknowledged that our labor economy is in a period of dramatic transformation. The dynamics of hiring, employment, and productivity are changing in profound ways. More [...]
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How to Use Personality Tests to Identify Future Leaders in Your Organization
In a recent article, we examined the potential role that personality testing can play in the hiring workflow. We highlighted the value of using fair, valid, and unbiased personality assessment tools like our Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) alongside traditional hiring methods and assessment tools in order to gain a [...]
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Can Personality Predict Job Performance? What the Research Says
As hiring costs rise and staffing shortages persist across a variety of industries, many employers are rethinking the way they approach hiring decisions. In a recent article, we explored the rising use of competency-based measures to evaluate prospective employees. We noted that this trend represents an evolution–in the way that [...]
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Top 10 HR Trends in 2025
The employment landscape has been in a state of constant transformation over the last half-decade. At Success Portraits, we’ve dedicated a considerable amount of time to this discussion. We find ourselves frequently returning to the conclusion that this is a uniquely challenging time for employers. Our current state of transformation [...]
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The Hidden Costs of Hiring and How You Can Avoid Them
In recent articles, we’ve noted the generally high cost of recruiting and the uniquely challenging employment landscape facing companies. Recruitment, hiring, and onboarding can burn through a ton of capital in pretty short order. Employers today face growing economic pressure to ensure that they’re getting their full ROI for this [...]
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Calculating Cost Per Hire (CPH) and Using it to Improve Hiring Outcomes
In recent articles, we’ve highlighted the high cost of hiring and discussed the importance of determining the ROI for your company’s investment in recruitment. Today, we’re highlighting Cost Per Hire (CPH), one of the most important metrics for calculating your ROI, controlling your hiring costs, and measuring both the efficiency [...]
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The Ethics of Personality Testing: What Employers Need to Know
Personality testing has a long and deep history in hiring. In our last article, we discussed the gradual evolution of personality testing over the last several decades. In that same article, we addressed some of the debate and controversy that have surrounded personality testing since its popular inception more than [...]
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How To Integrate Personality Testing Into Your Hiring Workflow
In one sense, using personality assessments in hiring is nothing new. Writers Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers created their famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator during World War II. Inspired by groundbreaking Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung, the mother-daughter team achieved widespread influence with their assessment was adopted by the [...]
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Calculating Your Hiring ROI — Are You Spending Too Much?
The hiring process is costly. From recruitment and vetting to onboarding and training, your business is probably spending a small fortune each year to attract, hire, and retain the right people. But are you getting your money’s worth out of these expenses? Are you getting a good hiring return on [...]
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How Competency-Based Assessment Can Improve Your Hiring Outcomes
Employers are at an inflection point. The process of hiring has never been more costly, competitive, or complicated than it is today. In this environment, your company can ill afford to make hiring mistakes, sustain high turnover rates, or struggle to retain valuable long-term employees. That’s why many employers are [...]
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How Hiring Mistakes Can Kill Your Small Business
Hiring the right people is essential to the success of any business. But for small businesses, the stakes are even higher. As a small business owner, you may face challenges like limited capital, slim profit margins, and an uphill climb toward brand recognition. It’s hard to overstate the importance of [...]
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The Pros and Cons of Hiring W2 vs. 1099 Employees
Hiring the right talent is vital to the long-term success of your business. Naturally, as a business owner, you already know how costly the whole hiring process is. From recruitment and interviewing to training and onboarding, bringing on new employees takes time and money. And if, like most business owners, [...]
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Why Soft Skills Matter More Than Ever in Today’s Workplace
In a lot of ways, the phrase “soft skills” can be somewhat misleading. The word soft almost seems to imply that these workplace skills are somehow of lesser importance than “hard” skills, or perhaps even that soft skills are somehow easier to come by than technical skills. But mounting evidence [...]
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How High Employee Turnover Can Crush Your Operating Budget
2020 was an inflection point. I probably don’t have to remind you. So much changed so quickly during the COVID-19 crisis, but perhaps nothing changed so profoundly as the labor landscape. A wave of shutdowns, furloughs and layoffs gave way to the so-called Mass Resignation. During “The Big Quit” of [...]
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The True Cost of a Bad Hire: Recruitment Mistakes Are More Expensive Than You Think
In a recent CareerBuilder survey, 75% of employers said that they’ve hired the wrong person for a position at some point in their career, and that the consequences of their mistakes went well beyond just the cost of hiring. Read on to find out what bad hires may be costing [...]
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Comparison of the Main Online Personality Tests
Over the past decade, the $500 million personality test industry has only continued to grow in popularity—to the tune of more than ten percent per year.[1] Personality tests are advertised to achieve various ends, from personal growth and career-counseling to personnel selection and teambuilding. But for anyone interested in taking [...]
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Exploring the 19 SPPT Traits
The essence of the Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) is its analysis of human personality based on 19 distinct and stable characteristics, or behavioral propensities, commonly known as “traits”. These traits jointly influence, but do not rigidly determine, everything we think, feel, and do. But what, precisely, are these traits? [...]
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Personality Tests: How I Became a Convert
Until recently, I had long doubted the scientific character of the discipline of psychology. For this reason, I did not have a very high opinion of personality tests, either. But now? Well, not so much. I don’t say I’ve become a wide-eyed enthusiast for the therapeutic culture. But, nowadays, I [...]
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Your Personality and Your Career
Sigmund Freud argued, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and elsewhere, that the two primary needs of the human animal are love and work. Nowadays, a lot of folks would understand him to mean “sex” and “money.” But that is not what Freud meant. We are animals with profound spiritual, [...]
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How Does the MBTI Stack Up Today?
For decades, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been the most-popular personality test on the market. However, with the passage of time and the development of a number of theoretically richer and empirically better-founded approaches to personality theory and testing, the market dominance of MBTI is now waning. The MBTI [...]