The Church Leader’s Guide To Personality & Performance Assessments - Pocket guide overview

Sep 18, 2026

The Church Leader’s Guide to Personality & Performance Assessments explains why personality assessments are widely used in church and ministry hiring to understand how candidates think, act, and align with organizational needs. It provides guidance on using results responsibly in interviews, warning against over-reliance, self-report bias, and the limits of assessments in diagnosing disorders or making final hiring decisions. The guide also introduces major assessment tools and what their outputs look like, including temperaments, DiSC, MBTI, and related profiles.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryReligion & Spirituality

FormatPDF

Pages6

Reading Time15 min

AccessFree to download

The purpose and cautions of personality assessments

Temperaments and foundational models

DiSC assessment overview

Myers-Briggs (MBTI) assessment overview

Keirsey Temperament profiles

Ministry-focused assessment profiles

Insights Discovery Proﬁle

Birkman Method

Values Index Proﬁle (Innermetrix)

Enneagram

The Church Leader’s Guide To Personality & Performance Assessments By Bob Sutton & Holly Tate Vanderbloemen Search Group [www.vanderbloemen.com](www.vanderbloemen.com) Personality assessments have been around for a long time. They help us better understand how people think, how they act, and what motivates them. In short, assessments can be a great tool for better understanding another person. In our work at Vanderbloemen Search Group helping churches and ministries ﬁnd their key staﬀ, we use several diﬀerent personality tests to better understand a candidate’s gifts and how they match those of the church. Because the use of assessments is becoming more widely used, there has been an increase in the number of tools out there that organizations and individuals can choose from. This pocket guide is meant to be a quick overview of the popular products being used today. A few words of caution: Because assessments ﬁlter information into categories, which help evaluators (potential and current employers) make sense of a person’s personality type, there can be a tendency to over-rely on this information during the interview process. Human beings are complex individuals whose personalities cannot be accurately simpliﬁed and yet still reﬂect the complexities of the whole person. Personality assessments, therefore, should not be seen as the ﬁnal evaluative tool deciding whether or not someone gets hired for a job. Personality tests will not identify personality disorders. Additionally, most of these assessments are self-administered. The individual taking the assessment in these cases have the ability to manipulate the results to achieve the perceived “desirable” result. In short, take the results into consideration, but don’t rely on them as unchangeable fact. In fact, it’s illegal not to hire someone solely based on a personality assessment. Read more about the legal ities here. INFO@ VANDERBLOEMEN. COM 713.300.9665 @ VANDERBLOEMENSG The Four Temperaments Most modern personality assessments are based on a classical (and very old) four-temperament pattern: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic. These have been the basis for most modern personality theory – although changed and reﬁned overtime by other psychologists and personality theorists. DiSC This test was developed in the 1950s as an assessment to better understand oneself, others, and behavior in interpersonal situations. The four categories of the DiSC are: Dominant, Inﬂuential, Steady, and Conscientious. The results of this assessment place people into one of 15 categories, which help them understand how they relate to others. There are many versions of this test. Find out more here. Meyers-Briggs (MBTI) This proﬁle uses C.G. Jung’s theory that people’s seemingly random variation in behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, due to the diﬀerences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment. It speciﬁcally looks at the way the person views the world, assesses information, makes decisions, and views structure. The MBTI’s results come in the form of four letters or “preference pairs” which are made up of Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I), Sensing (S) or Intuition (N), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), and Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). Find out more here. INFO@ VANDERBLOEMEN. COM 713.300.9665 @ VANDERBLOEMENSG Keirsey Temperament The Keirsey Temperament proﬁles results are similar to the MBTI, but rather than focusing on perception and judgment, Keirsey’s proﬁle identiﬁes behavioral patterns. The “KTS-11”categories individual behavior into four temperaments (see a pattern yet?) and four types of each temperament. The four Keirsey Temperaments are the Artisan, Guardian, Rational, & Idealist. Find out more here. Leading From Your Strengths – Ministry Insights This proﬁle is designed speciﬁcally for those in ministry positions, as the language is pastoral and ministry focused. It reveals the individual’s ha

FAQs

Why do churches and ministries use personality assessments?

They use assessments to better understand a candidate’s gifts, habitual behavior, and how well those traits match the organization’s needs and working style.

What are the main cautions when interpreting personality assessment results?

Assessment categories can lead interviewers to over-rely on results, and many tests are self-administered, allowing people to manipulate outcomes. Assessments should not be treated as the final decision tool, and personality tests cannot identify personality disorders.

Which major assessment tools are introduced in the guide?

The guide covers classical four temperaments, DiSC, Myers-Briggs (MBTI), Keirsey Temperament profiles, Ministry Insights, Insights Discovery, Birkman Method, Values Index (Innermetrix), and the Enneagram (RHETI).

Sep 18, 2026

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