Personality Assessments to Make Hiring Decisions More Effective

Getting the hiring decision wrong can be expensive for the organisation, frustrating at a minimum but with possible serious consequences for the hiring manager, and have a negative effect on the career and self-esteem of the mis-fitting new hire who won’t be able to perform well.

Bad hiring decisions occur for a variety of reasons but are usually due to a lack of real clarity on what type of individual is required for the vacant position. What behaviours are essential for a person to have to do the job well and which are desirable? If a person is lacking in one or two required behaviours, will they be able to acquire them or not? What kind of person will fit into the company’s work environment and culture? What potential has the candidate to develop in this role?

These are all important questions that need to be answered in reaching a decision to hire. However, even a well-prepared interview and trained interviewers would not be able to surface this level of required information. They may also struggle to identify the behaviours critical to the role. Other processes to assist the interviewers are required. There are two things that can ensure more focused interviews and more effective hiring decisions.

The first is a process to identify the most essential behaviours and skills required to do the job. This can be further divided into the minimum requirements – i.e. those behaviours and skills, and at what level, are required to simply do the job satisfactorily; and behaviours and skills that are desirable and would enable the job holder to perform well. A properly trained career advisor can facilitate this process either in a small group working in a structured way, or by an even simpler online job profiler tool.

The second process to ensure more effective hiring decisions is to use personality assessments (psychometric inventories). The better ones will identify and rate a candidate’s work behaviours both in terms of their ability in using them and their actual desire or motivation to do so. There is little point in hiring someone for an essential skill or behaviour is they don’t like to use it or have little motivation to do so. One of the underlying principles of these kind of assessments is that past behaviour is a good indicator of future performance.

For jobs that require special abilities such as verbal analysis or written communication, numerical ability and analysis, special awareness, or abstract reasoning, aptitude assessments can be used. The better ones will analyse both the level of current performance and the actual speed of doing so – quick mental analysis may be important in some jobs such as an air traffic controller or a stock or financial trader.

The results of a personality assessment will not only reveal a person’s strengths and possible weakness, and whether they possess the required behaviours for a position, but will also highlight areas that the interviewers need to probe further in a discussion with the candidate. Such lines of questioning will ensure that the interviewers will delve sufficiently deep to reveal the level of skill or behaviour that the candidate truly has. It will also identify areas that the candidate might need extra training in or inform their development plan. There is even a personality assessment that actually identifies specific questions to ask a candidate.

These additional ‘processes’ described above provide a balanced structure for a job interview. No longer do the hiring managers have to think about what questions they should ask candidates – the output of the personality assessments indicate what the interviewers need to discuss with the candidates.