Criteria EPP Results Explained: Trait Percentiles, Job Match and Response Style
The Criteria Employee Personality Profile reports twelve trait percentiles, a match to twelve job families and response-style flags. A walk through the sample.
The Employee Personality Profile is the personality questionnaire Criteria sells alongside the CCAT, and the two can appear on the same candidate summary. Unlike the CCAT it has no right answers, so the result works differently: not one score but a profile, a match percentage and a set of flags about how you answered. Criteria publishes a full sample report, which is what this guide walks through.
What you answered
The EPP has 140 short statements, such as “I am patient at work”, each rated from Always true to Always false. Criteria asks candidates to describe themselves “on a typical day when they are performing well”. It is untimed, and Criteria says most people finish in about 10 minutes.
Twelve traits, twelve percentiles
The EPP is built on the Big Five model plus several work-specific traits. Each of the twelve is reported as a percentile, which Criteria describes as how you scored on that trait relative to other test-takers. Its normative sample is 1,375 people, mostly being assessed for selection, promotion or evaluation, aged 15 and over, about 30% of them students. These are the sample candidate's twelve results:
- Achievement
- 91st percentile
- Assertiveness
- 21st percentile
- Competitiveness
- 38th percentile
- Conscientiousness
- 36th percentile
- Cooperativeness
- 93rd percentile
- Extroversion
- 61st percentile
- Managerial
- 68th percentile
- Motivation
- 64th percentile
- Openness
- 83rd percentile
- Patience
- 94th percentile
- Self-Confidence
- 68th percentile
- Stress Tolerance
- 24th percentile
Read those as a shape, not a mark. Criteria states that “there are no ‘high’ or ‘low’ scores on the EPP”. A 21st percentile for Assertiveness counts against you for collections work, where Criteria links assertiveness to success, and is typical of bank tellers, whose benchmark shows much lower than average Assertiveness. The brief describes both ends of every scale without judgement: low Extroversion is “low-key” and prefers time alone, and Criteria notes that introverted people may be more comfortable in independent work such as accounting.
The number the employer looks at first: job family match
The report's summary is a percentage match between your profile and a job family, a trait pattern Criteria built from people who succeed in that kind of work. The benchmarks were created in 2013 from three years of EPP data on specific positions, covering tens of thousands of administrations. There are twelve families, from Accounting and Finance to Software Engineering and Development and Sales and Business Development.
The same profile matches each family differently. Here are the sample candidate's published matches:
The employer had selected Analysis, Planning and Consulting, and the report shows Criteria's score range for that match as 60 to 100, so the sample's 67% sits inside it. The same person is a much stronger match for teller and clerical work, at 83%, because that family favours high Cooperativeness and Patience, two of the sample's highest traits. When a job family is selected, the trait ranges linked to success in that role are shaded green on each trait bar, so the employer can see which traits sit inside or outside them. Employers can also build custom ranges for their own roles.
The interview questions come from your profile
The score report generates interview questions from your results. Where a trait falls inside the job family's range, the questions confirm it; where it falls outside, they probe. In the sample, the candidate “scored below the range for Assertiveness”, and the suggested questions ask for a time they had to be firm and direct with someone. If you sat the EPP, prepare examples for the traits a role obviously needs, and expect to be asked about the ones that do not fit your profile. The STAR method is the usual shape for those answers.
The response style flags
The final section of the report checks how you answered, on three scales:
What you see, and how much it is worth
You do not see the score report. If the employer turns it on, you receive a Workplace Insights Report straight after the test, which describes your notable traits, working and communication style, strengths, challenges, stressors and motivators, but does not share your scores. Employers that use several Criteria tests may also see a Talent Signal, a weighted average across all of them.
On quality, Criteria reports internal consistency for the twelve scales between .66 and .88, and a correlation of .68 between EPP Conscientiousness and the same trait on Wonderlic's Five Factor Personality Profile. The lowest of those reliabilities sits just under the .70 that Criteria's own CCAT brief calls the usual threshold for acceptable reliability, which is a reason for employers not to read too much into any single trait.
Our Criteria practice includes the EPP format alongside the CCAT, and the CCAT score guide explains the aptitude half of the same report. For personality questionnaires in general, see the personality test guide.
