Thomas International behavioural assessment 2026: the complete guide

Published 8 April 2026 · Updated 3 September 2026 · 14 min read · DISC-based PPA behavioural assessment, GIA, TEIQue and HPTI — widely used in UK SMEs and recruitment agencies

Thomas International is a UK-based assessment company best known for the Personal Profile Analysis (PPA) — a DISC-based behavioural assessment — and the General Intelligence Assessment (GIA), a timed aptitude battery. If your invitation refers to a "Thomas International behavioural assessment," it's almost always this PPA questionnaire. Thomas assessments are widely used by UK recruitment agencies, SMEs, and mid-market companies, particularly for sales, management, and customer-facing roles. You're more likely to encounter Thomas assessments through a recruitment agency than directly from a large employer, since Thomas licenses its tools to thousands of independent recruitment consultancies across the UK rather than selling primarily to large enterprises directly.

This guide covers all four Thomas products you might realistically encounter — PPA, GIA, TEIQue, and HPTI — with a side-by-side comparison table, worked example questions for both the behavioural and cognitive sides of the assessment, section-by-section pacing advice, the mistakes that most commonly cost candidates points, and a full FAQ. Use the "on this page" links above to jump straight to whichever product your invitation actually mentions.

Personal Profile Analysis (PPA) — DISC

The PPA is a 24-item forced-choice questionnaire based on the DISC model (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance). Takes 8–10 minutes. For each group of four adjectives, you select which most and least describes you. The result is a DISC profile — four bars showing your relative levels of each trait — and a narrative report interpreting your working style, motivators, and behavioural tendencies. There are no "right" answers, but employers screen for profiles matching the role's requirements (e.g. high Dominance and Influence for sales leadership; high Compliance for quality assurance).

Each of the 24 item groups presents four adjectives describing workplace behaviour — for example "persuasive," "patient," "precise," and "assertive" — and asks you to pick the one that's most like you and the one that's least like you, leaving the middle two unmarked. The forced-choice format is deliberate: it prevents candidates from simply rating every adjective highly, which would produce a flat, uninformative profile. Because you're always comparing four options against each other rather than rating them independently, the resulting profile reflects your relative behavioural tendencies rather than an absolute self-rating.

The output report typically shows four separate graphs — a "least" graph capturing your natural, unmasked behavioural style, a "most" graph capturing your adapted style under workplace pressure, a combined graph showing the difference between the two (a large gap can indicate you're working in a way that doesn't come naturally, a potential stress or fit signal employers sometimes look for), and a final summary graph most reports display prominently.

General Intelligence Assessment (GIA)

A timed aptitude battery testing five cognitive dimensions: reasoning, perceptual speed, spatial visualisation, number speed and accuracy, and word meaning. Strictly timed (varies by section but typically 2–5 minutes each). The GIA produces a score from 1–9 (STE score — Standard Ten) for each dimension and an overall GIA score, compared to a working age norm. Employers typically set minimum GIA thresholds for specific roles — a GIA of 6+ (60th percentile or above) is commonly required for managerial roles.

The five GIA subtests run back to back with no break between them, and each has its own strict time limit rather than one shared pool of time across the whole battery — this matters practically, since you can't budget extra time for a subtest you find harder by taking it from one you find easier. Reasoning items are typically abstract, pattern-based questions similar to standard inductive reasoning tests. Perceptual speed items ask you to quickly compare pairs of strings or codes for exact matches, rewarding sustained visual attention over analytical depth. Spatial visualisation covers mental rotation and 3D-to-2D reasoning. Number speed and accuracy tests quick, simple arithmetic under significant time pressure — the difficulty here is speed, not the underlying maths. Word meaning tests vocabulary through synonym and antonym recognition.

TEIQue and HPTI: the two Thomas products candidates ask about least, but still encounter

Beyond PPA and GIA, Thomas offers two further assessments that show up less often for entry-level hiring but appear regularly for leadership, management, and specialist sales roles. The TEIQue (Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire) is a self-report measure of trait emotional intelligence — how you perceive, understand, and manage emotions in yourself and others — delivered as a series of statements you rate on an agreement scale, with no time limit and, like the PPA, no objectively right or wrong answers. It's most commonly used for people-management and client-facing roles where emotional self-awareness is considered a genuine job-relevant trait rather than a nice-to-have.

The HPTI (High Performance Trait Indicator) measures personality traits specifically linked to workplace performance and leadership potential — conscientiousness, adjustment, curiosity, risk approach, ambiguity acceptance, competitiveness, and adaptability are typical dimensions covered. Like the TEIQue, it's untimed and self-report, but unlike the PPA's DISC framework, HPTI's dimensions map more directly onto established personality-and-performance research, which is why it tends to appear for senior or leadership-track hiring specifically rather than general workforce screening.

Thomas assessments at a glance

A typical PPA-style question, worked

Since the PPA has no right or wrong answer, there's no "correct" answer to demonstrate — but understanding how the forced-choice format actually works removes most of the anxiety candidates feel going in. Here's an illustrative item group:

The reason honesty matters more than strategy here is that the PPA's internal consistency checks are specifically designed to flag response patterns that look like a candidate is trying to present an idealised profile rather than a genuine one — an inconsistent or implausibly "perfect" profile is itself a signal recruiters are trained to notice, and it tends to read worse than a genuine, less flashy profile that's internally consistent.

A typical GIA numerical question

Numerical reasoning on Thomas International tests is almost always table-based: two or three small tables of financial, sales, or operational data, followed by a question that requires a multi-step calculation and a unit conversion.

The actual Thomas International question adds distractors: prices in pence rather than pounds, mixed currencies, unit ambiguity (per pack vs per item). Candidates who rush the unit check pick C or B despite nailing the arithmetic.