Using the right Personality Assessment to find and keep high performers

Using the right Personality Assessment to find and keep high performers

October 11, 2024

Why use a personality assessment?

A good personality assessment adds enormous value at various stages in the employee journey including hiring and onboarding, when managing a struggling employee and when looking to improve team performance.  Specifically, a personality assessment will: 

  • Enable you to better define what you are looking for in a new employee, and with a more accurate description of what success looks like, you are better placed to find a high performer.
  • Give you a more accurate and reliable understanding of the person. By knowing, with greater certainty, what drives and engages your candidates and employees and how they are likely to respond to situations, you will make better hiring decisions and leverage this information to achieve superior performance from them during their tenure.  
  • Provide you with an ideal platform from which to develop individuals and teams, as it gives them an objective view of their strengths and potential areas of growth, which you as the manager can use to guide them to high performance.

“By knowing, with greater certainty, what drives and engages your candidates and employees, you will make better hiring decisions and leverage this information to achieve superior performance”.

How to best use a personality assessment?

  • Don’t make decisions on personality alone. Personality assessments dramatically improve your ability to identify and manage high performers but for the ultimate result they should be used with other data sets, not instead of other data. Whilst personality will explain a fair bit of a person’s performance, behaviour can also vary according to the situation and as a function of one’s motivation and skill development.  Therefore, pairing personality data with interviews, reference checks and other valid skills assessments will get you the best result.         
  • Pair the tool with an expert to interpret the results.  The profile report is not self-explanatory (unless you have spent hundreds of hours learning how to interpret it yourself).  The lay person needs guidance on what terms mean, on how to combine and contextualise data to provide real and relevant understanding of the respondent, and on how to avoid jumping to incorrect conclusions.  The expert goes beyond the one dimension of the report and tells you exactly what behaviours you will see and why they are likely to show those behaviours.  The expert tells you what further questions you should ask in interview and reference checks and gives you advice on what strategies you should prioritise to get the best out of the person if you hire them.

“The expert tells you exactly what behaviours you will see and why they are likely to show those behaviours, what further questions you should ask and gives you advice on what strategies you should prioritise to get the best out of the person if you hire them”.

When should I use a personality assessment?

  • When defining the role to create a success template.
  • When hiring, and specifically before final interview and reference checks. Knowing what’s required for success in the role, personality data gives you a more detailed and accurate understanding of the candidate’s closeness of fit for the role.  It helps you home in on the best areas to probe – in your next candidate interview and with referees – to acquire those final crucial data points that will improve your hiring decisions.  
  • In the first weeks of onboarding a new employee, use the rich data from the personality profile to help guide your decisions and strategies to achieve employee engagement, development, wellbeing and performance.
  • When coaching a struggling employee to help understand what might be driving their behaviour, increase their self-awareness, and to provide motivation and direction for change.
  • When working with a team to help them develop specific capabilities and lift their team cohesion and performance.
Personality profiles are a highly under-utilised gold mine of critical, practical information that you can keep coming back to again and again at key points in your employee and team journeys, to make better decisions and achieve better results. But choose wisely as only some assessments and only some experts can give you the answers you need and the value you deserve.
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