Investing in your people and uncovering what keeps them engaged will have a direct, positive impact on their workplace interactions, their professional development, and their overall job satisfaction. Enhancements in these areas can lead to long-lasting improvements in the recruitment and retention of key personnel and significant, long-term benefits for your business.
Personality assessments provide the most efficient and effective path for understanding personality at work.
Once you start looking at the various assessment options available, you’ll notice that cost varies greatly. To make the best decision for your organization and, more importantly, for your people, you need to understand the associated cost ranges and what you can expect from each category of personality assessment.
The pyramid of personality assessments
Think of the personality assessment industry like a pyramid, with assessment solutions coming from one of three categories:
Effective: Check the box
At the base of the pyramid is the Effective level, where you’ll find the greatest number of tools. These assessment products often use a number, color, or letter-based code to assign people to a particular personality category or type.
These do-it-yourself tools can range from $10 to $75 per assessment, with participants receiving some form of summary PDF that offers a snapshot of their personality type. These tools are not comprehensive, but they do give participants some insight into their own tendencies and motivate additional conversations. They can also support enhanced awareness of how they might interact with others.
If you want to “check the box” and say that you’ve implemented some type of personality assessment, tools at this level meet those criteria.
Related: Why Personality Assessments Fail
Enhanced: Get the big picture
The next level up in the pyramid is the Enhanced level. These solutions are typically more comprehensive, with a stronger, well-established research foundation. Organizations using tools at this level can be more confident in the quality of their assessment results and make good use of the standardized insights based on broad score ranges contained in the reports.
This template-driven approach can help apply personality-based insights to decision-making and development efforts. They generally focus on a narrower set of personality attributes and can offer a solid view of the big picture, although these tools can overlook the nuance and context needed for maximum impact.
Tools at the Enhanced level also provide more structure and rigor than the “check the box” personality typing tools found at the Effective level in the pyramid. These types of assessments can be helpful during the hiring process or for organizational development to improve interactions with those inside or outside our organization.
Often these tools report on “potential problems” and will highlight challenges without giving guidance on how to address them. Some users can feel judged or that they underperformed. However, with the right training and guidance, participants can discover how to pivot these reports into productive action.
Enhanced assessment tools range between $50 and $250 per assessment and provide a more detailed summary report and guidance. It’s not uncommon to need additional training and consulting to apply these systems to your organization. Certification and consulting could start as little as $20,000 and could increase tenfold and beyond depending on your goals, required support, and the size of your organization.
The table below provides a helpful reference for the different levels of assessment.
| Effective | Enhanced | Engaged | |
| Cost Range | $10 – $75 per assessment | $50 – $250 per assessment | $15,000+ for pilots, can exceed $150,000 |
| Additional Costs | None | $20,000+ for certification and consulting | Varies based on implementation scale |
| Output Format | Summary PDF | Comprehensive report | Tailored, organization-specific insights |
| Personality Categorization | Number, color, or letter-based codes | Standardized insights based on score ranges | In-depth behavioral insights |
| Depth of Analysis | Basic snapshot | More comprehensive, research-based | Strategic, culture-focused |
| Application | Basic self-awareness and interaction insights | Hiring process, organizational development | Recruitment, retention, team dynamics, leadership development |
| Customization | Low | Moderate | High |
| Implementation Complexity | Low (DIY) | Moderate (may require training) | High (often includes expert guidance) |
| Focus | Individual tendencies | Addressing specific behaviors | Strategic transformation and culture building |
| Long-term Impact | Limited | Moderate | High (aims for sustained organizational change) |
| Professional Support | Minimal | Some training and consulting | High-touch, committed professional partnership |
| Best For | Organizations wanting basic personality insights | Companies seeking more rigorous personality assessment | Organizations focused on building intentional culture and developing top talent |
Engaged: Streamline hiring and professional development
The Engaged level focuses on a strategic transformation that provides a path from the current culture to the envisioned culture of the highly engaged organization. This is where you seek to understand where individuals are most likely to thrive. For example, you might want to discover which candidates could be the best fit for a specific role or how they might work with other colleagues on an established team.
At the Engaged level, you get behavioral insights that shape personal and professional development, engender high levels of job satisfaction and engagement, and go beyond hiring to support an individual’s career. Here, employees see the company is invested in their personal and professional development. This can lead to better recruitment and retention of key personnel.
Solutions at the Engaged level also focus on measurable results, typically providing an ecosystem of committed, high-caliber professionals who partner with your organization. This allows you to hit the ground running while members of your team go through certification and training to empower your organization to make the greatest, long-term impact on recruiting and hiring, employee engagement, team dynamics, and leadership development. Clients of these Engaged assessment systems often describe them as high-touch, tailored, targeted, organization-specific, and dynamic with a clear goal of positively impacting work culture, not just a single challenge with one individual or behavior.
Most importantly, these Engaged solutions deliver clear and concise insights into competencies that provide actionable development plans to realize rapid results. Embrace the Engaged level if you seek to improve recruitment, streamline confident hiring decisions, enrich team dynamics, supercharge engagement, avoid turnover, and develop the next generation of leaders within your organization.
As with any enterprise implementation, the costs of training, certification, pilot, and rollout can vary greatly. Top performing organizations engage experienced professionals who define the ROI up front to help justify these investments. It’s not unusual for an organization to invest in excess of $15k or even $150k to leverage expert guidance and customized solutions throughout the process to ensure a smooth start and sustained success. Critically, because the goals and metrics of Engaged solutions are clearly defined, success is quantifiable.
The Engaged level is the right fit if you are focused on recruiting, retaining, and developing top talent and building an intentional culture. The investment these organizations make is minimal compared to the cost of losing one key candidate or team member.
Choosing the right assessment for your organization
A recent survey conducted by Paradigm Personality Labs showed that 80% of new hires don’t work out because of a lack of “culture fit or personality traits.” An additional 9% claimed that the interview process overlooked nuances in the candidate. Implementing the right personality assessment can pay for itself many times over. Take the time to ensure the tool you select is the one best aligned with your goals, and you’ll quickly get the insights you need to take your organization to the next level of excellence.
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