Personality tests like DISC and Myers-Briggs fail at sales hiring because they measure broad traits — communication style, temperament, how someone interacts with others — instead of the traits that actually drive revenue. They’re also self-reported, which means candidates can answer the way they think you want to see rather than how they actually behave. What actually predicts sales success is Drive: the combination of Need for Achievement, Competitiveness, and Optimism. Drive shows up in behavior — consistent follow-up, persistence through rejection, initiative — which makes it harder to fake than a personality questionnaire.

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I’ve spent over twenty years building assessments for one purpose: figuring out, before you hire someone, whether they will actually sell.

In that time, I’ve watched hundreds of sales VPs and hiring managers lean on personality tests to make that call. I understand why. These tools are everywhere, they’re easy to administer, and they produce a tidy report with a color or a four-letter code that feels like an answer.

But here’s what I’ve learned from researching and developing sales assessments since 2002, and from working with more than 1,500 companies on their hiring process: a personality test and a sales assessment are not the same thing, and using one in place of the other is one of the most expensive mistakes in sales hiring. I’ve seen it cost companies $50,000, $100,000, or more per bad hire once you count salary, ramp time, missed pipeline, and the manager’s time spent coaching someone who was never going to produce.

Let me walk you through why this happens, and what I look for instead.

What a Personality Test Actually Measures

Most personality assessments — DISC, Myers-Briggs, and the dozens of tools modeled after them — are questionnaires built to describe behavioral style. They tell you whether someone tends to be outgoing or reserved, structured or spontaneous, people-focused or task-focused.

That’s useful information. It’s just not the information that predicts whether someone will hit quota.

Broad personality isn’t the same thing as sales performance.

A candidate can be warm, articulate, and easy to talk to — the profile most personality tests reward — and still fold the first time a prospect ignores three emails in a row. I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count.

“Broad personality isn’t the same thing as sales performance.”

Why Personality Tests Fall Short in Sales Hiring

1. They don’t measure what actually drives sales results.

Sales success depends on a specific set of behaviors: persistence, resilience, internal motivation, and the ability to absorb rejection without taking it personally and without slowing down. Most personality tools were never designed to isolate those traits. They were built for team-building workshops and communication coaching, not for predicting revenue production.

2. The results can be shaped by the candidate.

Most personality assessments are easy to read. A candidate can look at a question, recognize what a “good” answer looks like, and respond accordingly — consciously or not. This isn’t speculation. In a field study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers found that job applicants distort their answers on personality inventories significantly more than people who already hold the job, and that this distortion measurably changes who gets hired.

Separately, personality-testing researcher Lynn McFarland of Clemson University has documented the same pattern in an applied setting: candidates learn which traits are easiest to “dial up” when a job is on the line.

In other words, candidates answer the way they think you want to see, not the way they actually behave. That gap is exactly where bad hires slip through.

3. They’re often too broad to be job-specific.

Personality tests are built to describe general tendencies — how someone communicates, how they process information, how they show up in a group. They weren’t built to determine whether a specific trait predicts performance in a specific role. A tool that tells you a candidate is “outgoing” tells you almost nothing about whether they’ll build their own pipeline from scratch.

4. Many aren’t backed by rigorous, job-specific validity research.

If an assessment can’t demonstrate a proven statistical relationship between its results and actual job performance, it has no business driving a hiring decision. A lot of the free or informal personality quizzes circulating online were built for entertainment, not for personnel selection. Even the most widely used type-based instrument, the Myers-Briggs, has drawn documented criticism in the peer-reviewed literature for weak test-retest reliability and limited ability to predict job performance. That distinction matters enormously once real money and real revenue are on the line.

5. Self-report on your own behavior is harder than it sounds.

Most of us think we can accurately describe how we behave under pressure. Few of us actually can. Candidates tend to answer in the way they’d like to be perceived rather than the way they actually operate, and that optimistic self-image quietly skews the results — not necessarily out of dishonesty, but because self-awareness under a job-interview lens is a genuinely hard thing to do well.

6. Results can shift from one sitting to the next.

I’ve seen candidates take a well-known personality inventory, get flagged as an extrovert with one profile, then retake it a few weeks later and land somewhere entirely different. When a tool’s output isn’t stable over time, you can’t build a hiring process on top of it.

So, What Should You Be Testing for Instead? Drive.

If broad personality isn’t the answer, what is?

In my research and practice, one trait consistently separates top sales producers from everyone else: Drive.

Drive isn’t a communication style. It’s not whether someone is introverted or extroverted. It’s the internal engine behind the behaviors that actually generate revenue — showing up for the fifth follow-up call when four have already gone nowhere, competing hard for a deal that isn’t guaranteed, and taking initiative without anyone telling them to.

That’s the piece most hiring processes miss. Drive is:

• Behavioral. It shows up in what someone actually does, not how they describe themselves.
• Observable. You can see it in a candidate’s history and hear it in how they talk about setbacks.
• Much harder to fake over time. It has to hold up under sustained pressure, not just a single 30-minute questionnaire.

Through years of research and behavioral interviews with both successful producers and underperformers, I identified three specific, non-teachable characteristics that combine to form Drive. Each one is grounded in its own line of psychological research, not just my own observation:

1. Need for Achievement — an internal, almost restless desire to accomplish more, regardless of outside recognition or reward. This traces back to psychologist David McClelland’s foundational research on achievement motivation.
   
2. Competitiveness — a genuine need to win, whether that’s against a competitor, a quota, or last month’s number. Research published in the Journal of Marketing found that salespeople high in trait competitiveness set higher goals and outperform their less competitive peers, particularly in organizations with a competitive culture.
   
3. Optimism — the ability to take rejection in stride, recover quickly, and stay productive instead of internalizing every “no.” This is the trait behind one of the best-known studies in sales psychology: when Martin Seligman measured explanatory style in new MetLife insurance agents, the more optimistic agents outsold their more pessimistic peers and were far less likely to quit in their first year.

None of that shows up reliably on a DISC report. It shows up in how someone has actually behaved when things got hard.

Why I Built The DriveTest® the Way I Did

Back in 2002, I went looking for an assessment that measured Drive specifically in sales candidates. I couldn’t find one. Every tool on the market was measuring general personality or general aptitude — nothing was built to isolate the traits I was seeing, over and over, in top producers versus the people who looked great in interviews and then quietly failed.

So, I built one. Here’s what makes it fundamentally different from a standard personality test:

It uses a forced-choice format.

Instead of rating yourself on a scale (which is easy to fake), you’re given several statements that are all positive, and asked to choose which is most and least like you. For example:

Choose which of these statements is most like you and which is least like you:

• I focus on career progression
• I enjoy social activities
• I develop new approaches

Because every option sounds appealing, there’s no obvious “right” answer to chase. That single design choice removes most of the impression-management problem that undermines standard personality tests.

It includes a Consistency Scale.

This flags contradictory answer patterns that suggest a candidate is trying to manage their image rather than answer honestly, so you know when to look at a result with more scrutiny.

It’s grounded in validity research, not vibes.

I built The DriveTest® on the psychological research behind achievement motivation, competitiveness, and explanatory style (optimism), and validated it against actual sales performance data — not just internal consistency.

It measures one thing on purpose: the traits tied to producing revenue. Not communication style. Not general temperament. Drive.

To Be Fair: Personality Tests Aren’t Useless

I want to be careful here, because I’m not telling you to throw personality tests away.

They can be genuinely valuable — just not as your primary hiring filter. Once someone is already on your team, a personality profile can help you understand how they communicate, where friction might come from on a team, and how to coach them more effectively. That’s a real, legitimate use case.

The mistake isn’t using a personality test. The mistake is using one to answer a question it was never built to answer: will this person produce revenue?

Personality tests work best as a secondary tool, layered in after you’ve already established that a candidate has the Drive to succeed — not as the deciding factor in whether you hire them.

How to Put This Into Practice

If you’re evaluating your current hiring process, here’s the shift I’d recommend:

1. Assess for Drive first. Use a sales-specific, forced-choice assessment before you fall in love with a candidate in the interview room. Once a hiring manager is emotionally invested, it’s easy to rationalize away a weak result.
   
2. Interview for evidence of past behavior. Ask about a time they lost a deal they badly wanted, or pursued a difficult goal no one required of them. Push past the first, polished answer.
   
3. Use personality insights after the hire, not instead of the hire. Let those tools inform onboarding and coaching, not the decision to bring someone on.
   
4. Know what each tool in your process is actually measuring — and what it isn’t. That one habit will save you from more bad hires than almost anything else you can do.

If you are weighing specific tools, this comparison of the best sales assessment tools breaks down what each one actually measures.

Frequently Asked Questions

About the Author: Dr. Chris Croner is a clinical psychologist and Principal at SalesDrive, LLC. He developed The DriveTest® sales assessment and is co-author of Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again. He has helped more than 1,500 companies worldwide identify and hire top-performing salespeople. Connect with him on LinkedIn.