Our guest blogger this month is Rachel Frost, an Occupational and Coaching Psychologist with extensive experience in personality profiling across public and private sector organisations. Rachel works closely with Understood to deliver the Big Five Personality Programme.

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For decades people have been told to polish their CVs, stack up qualifications, and load their LinkedIn profiles with skills endorsements. And yet, after years of working with organisations across the public and private sector, helping them assess, develop and retain their people, I firmly believe that what you know matters far less than who you are.

Skills go out of date. Knowledge can be Googled. But your personality? That’s what determines whether you thrive, adapt when things change, collaborate under pressure, and keep going when it gets tough. And for businesses trying to build effective, resilient teams, that can be the difference between coping and truly performing.

The shift that’s already happened

Over the last decade, personality profiling has shifted from something used mainly for senior leadership roles to something far more widely adopted. Organisations are realising that workplace personality assessment isn’t just for the boardroom. It matters at every level. Understanding someone’s behavioural tendencies, how they handle change, how they respond to pressure, and how they show up in a team, matters whether you’re hiring, developing people, or investing in strengthening team dynamics.

The way we think about personality has changed too. Many of us will remember being given a four-letter type and told: “That’s you.” The backlash against Myers-Briggs-style assessments hasn’t been entirely fair; they were never meant to put people in boxes. But they were often used that way, and the damage that does is real. When personality becomes a fixed label rather than a starting point for conversation, it stops being useful. The whole point of good personality profiling is what you do with the insight: how it informs development, shapes team conversations, and helps people understand each other better.

What’s replaced it is trait-based thinking. Rather than putting you in a box, it asks: where do you sit on a spectrum? Trait approaches, like the Big Five, are widely considered to be the strongest alternatives to Myers Briggs. They don’t define who you are. They describe how you tend to behave. That’s a more useful, honest and flexible picture for individuals and organisations alike.

What employers are actually buying

A personality profile gives organisations a clearer picture of the person they’re bringing into the team, not just the polished version they met at interview. They need to understand the real you: the one who turns up when a project has hit a wall.

Employers need to know that their people can adapt, and that individuals will bring others along with them. A technically skilled team that can’t communicate or navigate conflict rarely performs as well as one that can. Traits like openness, conscientiousness and emotional resilience aren’t just interesting data points; they tell us a great deal about how someone is likely to perform across a wide range of future scenarios.

The self-awareness question

One of the most interesting parts of my work is after someone has completed a personality questionnaire and we sit down to discuss it. That conversation reveals something the questionnaire alone never could: how well does someone actually know themselves?  How does their personality translate into work behaviour?

Some people are unfazed by even the more challenging aspects of their results and don’t see the implications. Others undersell themselves so thoroughly that part of my job becomes helping them articulate what they actually bring.

There’s also the question of impression management. Candidates naturally try to present themselves in the best possible light, and we can usually spot it. The real picture tends to emerge in the conversation, not the questionnaire itself. This is one of the reasons I believe the human element in personality profiling is irreplaceable and nowhere is that more important than for individuals with neurodivergent traits. A questionnaire format can create real barriers. The human conversation is where individuals can genuinely shine. Removing the conversation risks screening out some of the most creative and original thinkers in the candidate pool, which is not just a legal problem, it’s a performance one.

AI is coming and that’s mostly a good thing

AI is accelerating the tools we use. Computer generated psychometric tools used to generate static reports with fixed headings and generic narrative. Now we have tools that map a person’s profile dynamically against specific performance, weighted by relevance to the role. The result is a more focused starting point, which means the human discussion that follows can go deeper, faster.

But I’d offer a caution. Some of the assessment tools entering the market are being built by software engineers with no psychologists involved and no published technical validation. If you ask to see the evidence base and there isn’t one, that should raise concern. AI is a brilliant tool. It becomes a serious problem when it’s making the decisions.

The sweet spot

The best approach sits between two extremes: not the old-fashioned static report, but not a faceless algorithm deciding someone’s fate either. It’s the combination of smart, well-validated tools like the Big Five, used as a focused starting point, followed by a skilled conversation with someone who knows how to draw out what the profile really means.

That’s where personality profiling genuinely earns its place. Not as a box-ticking exercise or a label, but as a way of understanding people well enough to give them, and the teams they join, a real chance of getting it right.

The future of work will always involve uncertainty. But with the right insight, we can be far more intentional about how we select, support and develop the people navigating it.

If you’d like to explore how the Big Five Personality Programme could support your organisation’s hiring or development approach, let’s talk.

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