Personality profiling in recruitment – as essential as sunscreen in summer!
October 17, 2024
Many organisations think of personality profiling for recruitment as an optional extra. That’s like saying SPF50 is optional for fair skin in summer. You can risk going without it but when that new hire doesn’t work out you’ll feel as burnt and red faced as the person without sunscreen. Think of personality profiling as your protection against having to re-do the whole recruitment process and/or experiencing the nightmare of managing underperformance.
If you view personality profiling as optional it is probably because no one has really explained, and shown you, how personality assessment done right can dramatically increase your chances of hiring the right person. When it’s done right, personality profiling moves from an ‘optional extra’ to an ‘essential component’ of talent acquisition.
Of course, not just any old personality profile will do. It has to be a Big5 tool given the Big 5 personality theory is the most widely accepted and empirically supported theory of personality. Secondly the tool has to be paired with a skilled interpreter. The tool has the foundational information but it’s the person interpreting it who makes the data meaningful and useful.
So here are the reasons why personality profiling is essential if you want better hiring outcomes.
- It gives you more accurate data than an interview. With personality assessments you get a much better understanding of the candidate’s capability compared to an interview. If you only have the interview, you will have only gained one or maybe two isolated point-in-time data points per competency from the candidate. The way they performed in these situations may be wildly different from what they usually do because the candidate has cherry picked their best (and maybe only) example of showing competence in that area. A personality profile is based on a robust number of data points per competency so we can be more certain as to its accuracy and reliability.
- The quality of your second interview increases. Having experienced a debrief of the results and found your understanding of the candidate has dramatically increased, you are able to identify better questions for the next interview and as a result obtain a further enriched set of data to help you make better hiring decisions.
- The quality of your reference check increases. We all know that reference checking can feel like a process of box ticking. Many of us have resigned ourselves to reference checks being of limited value because we tell ourselves we’re not going to get the real story from referees. However, reference checks can be a high value exercise and I provide my clients with tips on how to engage with referees to get more honest answers. Obtaining high quality data - by combining the results of interview with the personality profile – positions you to identify better questions for the referees. And this data will better equip you to detect when the referee may be giving you biased responses so that you can re-direct the referee in a way that gets you more accurate answers.
- The hiring manager has a blueprint for success with your new employee. The value of personality profiling doesn’t stop once you’ve made your hiring decision. The data you’ve obtained provides an ongoing guide for manager-employee discussions about onboarding, development, wellbeing and performance. It gives managers an extensive range of data to help them understand how to get the best out of the new employee, how to ensure they settle in and get up to speed quickly, how to support them, what they need to learn and grow in the role, and how they will work best with the rest of the team. In short, it’s the most useful companion a manager can have.
