Thomas' workplace personality assessment
How do you know if someone is well suited to a certain job role or position? The Thomas High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI) helps identify leadership potential by exploring a person’s personality traits.

Assessment Information
Assessment type: Leadership
Format: 78 questions
Availability: 25+ languages
Time to complete: 8 minutes
Training required: HPTI Accreditation
Validation: The HPTI has been extensively validated and optimised for workplace applications following psychometric research with thousands of participants with the acquired data being subject to advanced statistical methods.
For our senior team members, who are highly skilled and experienced people, HPTI has helped to bring clarity to conversations on where to go next helping us to put leadership action plans in place.

For our senior team members, who are highly skilled and experienced people, HPTI has helped to bring clarity to conversations on where to go next helping us to put leadership action plans in place.


For our senior team members, who are highly skilled and experienced people, HPTI has helped to bring clarity to conversations on where to go next helping us to put leadership action plans in place.
Background & Theory
The High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI) was developed by Ian MacRae and Adrian Furnham in 2006.
It has been designed based on an ‘optimality’ model, which assumes that personality traits can be considered ‘optimal’ based on the requirements of a particular job role or position, such as senior executive leadership.
The HPTI measures Conscientiousness, Adjustment, Curiosity, Risk Approach, Ambiguity Acceptance and Competitiveness.
A person’s responses are reflected back as a position on a continuum for each of the 6 traits, consisting of Low, Moderate, Optimal or Excessive. Too much or too little of a trait will have advantages as well as disadvantages. Certain trait levels can indicate a high potential to succeed, or potentially indicate characteristics that could de-rail an otherwise successful person.


Format of the Thomas HPTI
The Thomas HPTI is a self-report questionnaire. Individuals indicate their level of agreement on a 1-7 Likert scale (1 ‘disagree completely’ to 7 ‘agree completely) with 78 unique items. The HPTI takes just 8 minutes to complete.
Reliability & Validity
The HPTI has been developed over many years in collaboration with experts, professionals and practitioners through research programmes and in collaboration with researchers at University College London and High Potential Psychology Ltd.

Frequently Asked Questions
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What are workplace personality assessments?
Workplace personality assessments are used by employers to help find an individual whose character traits are best suited for a specific position and determine whether they will excel in the role.
The Thomas High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI) provides you with invaluable insights into how employees approach their work and helps identify leadership potential by exploring a person’s personality traits.
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What are the benefits of workplace personality tests?
If an employee is placed in a position that doesn't match his or her personality, it often leads to lower engagement. Low employee engagement can result in higher staff turnover and the associated costs of replacing them.
Workplace personality tests give employers a tool that gives them quantifiable data to help them make the correct decisions. Typically delivered online, they can be distributed and processed quickly, speeding up the hiring process.
In just 8 minutes, Thomas’ High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI) can indicate a high potential to succeed or identify characteristics that could de-rail an otherwise successful person.
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How is leadership potential assessed?
There are a number of ways in which employers can find out about someone’s capacity to lead others. Historically, individuals have been given responsibility for people and either sink or swim.
Increasingly though, organisations are far more aware of the risks of doing this and turn to psychometric assessments to help identify people with the highest leadership potential.
The Thomas High Potential Trait Indicator (HPTI) helps identify leadership potential by exploring a person’s personality traits and provides an insight into how suited they may be for a given job role or position.
Emotional intelligence (the ability to understand your emotions and those of others) has also been identified as advantageous in helping someone to achieve their potential and is now regarded a key component of effective leadership.
Thomas’ emotional intelligence assessment, the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) enables you to understand your employees and help develop your future leaders.