The Difference Between Personality And Character

When workplaces make new recruits take personality tests and focus on the personality, they often forget to consider the deeper character, honesty, or ethics of the person they are hiring, and end up with employees that appear to fit well in the company but who can't contribute to the success of the company. A company will spend thousands of dollars trying to hire someone who appears bubbly, confident, and outgoing. But bubbly is only a surface appearance. What we actually need is character, and we have gotten completely confused about the difference.

My name is Erik Thor. In my twenties, I was starting to figure out who I was and how to make myself employable. I was in university, wondering how I could sell myself to an employer and compete with candidates who had better grades or different skills. The idea was simple: if I can find the job that best fits my personality, and convince them I am that person, I will finally have a secure career.

That is why Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers created the Myers-Briggs system in the 1940s, to help companies place people into wartime roles. Today, personality tests are a billion-dollar corporate sorting machine. But these four letters only describe how you present yourself on the outside. They do not describe your virtues or who you are on the inside.

In ancient Greece, people understood character through inner virtues: curiosity, honesty, kindness, and industriousness. You cannot see those inner qualities at a glance across a conference table. Personality is an extroverted comparison with others based on market competition; character is an introverted virtue of how you show up when things get difficult.

You see the exact same mistake when dating: do you want to date someone who is nice, or someone who is kind? Nice is an appearance; it is holding a door, complimenting a shirt, and smiling across a restaurant table. Kindness is an inner virtue; kindness is sitting by a hospital bed when someone is sick, or keeping a promise on a Tuesday afternoon when you are exhausted and doing it costs you something. Nice is how someone presents; kindness is who someone is.

The obsession with personality makes many people feel unemployable, believing they have the wrong four letters to ever succeed. That happened to me directly when I applied for a customer service job thinking I was an INFJ. My very first thought was: I have to lie. I had to pretend to be an extra-charming extrovert who loved noisy cubicles and being on the phone all day, just to survive the interview.

We built an entire hiring system that rewards people for being inauthentic. Employers spend millions on testing, only to find that the candidate who performed so well in the interview is a completely different person when they show up on Monday morning. The employer feels cheated, while the employee sits at their desk drained from maintaining a mask.

If resumes and interviews only test how well someone performs an image, how do we actually discover character? First, ask for real life lessons: find out what they do when a deadline slips, when stress hits, or when they made an honest mistake and had to fix it. Second, talk to people who worked alongside them, because referrals reveal how someone behaves under pressure. Third, give them a practical trial for a few days to see how they collaborate in the actual environment.

This distinction between surface appearance and inner character is why I wrote my book, Why I Love. When you look beneath the mask, you stop asking how you appear to others and start asking what you genuinely love and care about. How do you talk to yourself when you fail? How do you treat the people around you, and how do you show up for a project that matters?

Even if you are an introvert who struggles to sell yourself in an interview, you have inner qualities and virtues that are invaluable to a workplace. You can pre-order Why I Love through the link down in the comments. Have you ever felt forced to pretend to have a different personality just to get hired? Let me know in the comments below.