We think you should know exactly how a personality test works before you trust it with how you see yourself, or how your team sees you. Here's how the Big 5 at Work assessment is built, what your scores mean, and what we're still verifying.
The model
The Five Factor Model, often called the Big Five, is the most widely used and researched model of personality in psychology, backed by decades of studies across many cultures. It describes personality on five spectrums: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Each trait is made up of more specific facets, and every position on every spectrum comes with its own strengths. There is no right score.
The questions
Every statement in the Big 5 at Work assessment is adapted from the IPIP-NEO, a public-domain Big Five questionnaire from the International Personality Item Pool that researchers have used with hundreds of thousands of people. We rewrote each statement as something people actually do at work, while keeping the trait and facet it measures, and we score your answers with the IPIP's published method. Research on workplace personality testing finds that asking about behavior at work, rather than life in general, tends to predict how people actually show up at work as well or better.
We left out the questionnaire's four statements about political views, because they don't belong in a workplace assessment. The free test uses the first 58 statements; the full assessment adds the other 58.
Your results
Your scores are percentiles. The 70th percentile on Extraversion means you scored higher than about 70% of people. The full assessment also scores the facets within each trait, like Assertiveness or Orderliness, because two people with the same overall score can show up very differently at work. For now, those comparisons use published research data from the original questionnaire (Kajonius and Johnson, 2018, more than 320,000 people). As more people take the Big 5 at Work version, we'll rebuild them from our own data.
Honest about what's next
The original IPIP-NEO has strong published reliability. Because we reworded its statements for the workplace, we don't borrow those numbers. We're measuring how consistent the Big 5 at Work version is with our own users, and we'll publish what we find here, including any statements we rework as a result.
Big 5 at Work is built to help people understand themselves and each other. It isn't designed or validated for hiring, promotion or performance decisions, and we ask organizations not to use it that way.
Your individual answers are never shown to your manager, HR or your team. If you join a team, nothing is shared until you choose to share, and even then teammates see only your five trait scores. You can stop sharing at any time.
Your scores come from the questionnaire, not from AI. In the full assessment, an AI guide talks through each trait with you and writes your report, so the results reflect how you actually work. If something feels off, you can say so and adjust it.
Who's behind it
Big 5 at Work was created by Christin Camacho, author of "Why You Need Neurotic People on Your Team: Using the Big 5 Personality Traits to Build Emotional Intelligence at Work." She also created Big 5 at Work's team workshops, led by Big 5 at Work Consultants, where people compare their results and practice working across their differences.
Sources
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Kajonius, P. J., and Johnson, J. A. (2018). Sex differences in 30 facets of the five factor model of personality in the large public (N = 320,128). Personality and Individual Differences, 129, 126-130.
International Personality Item Pool: ipip.ori.org
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