Why personality assessments are more important than ever

A well-written CV and a confident attitude in a face-to-face interview aren’t enough for recruiters to decide whether a candidate is the right person for a role.

This comes as recruitment web site Monster.com[i] recently revealed the top three recruiting process challenges for 2021 were assessing candidates during the interview, identifying quality candidates quickly and effectively screening candidates pre-interview.

Nicolas Speeckaert says, “The high cost of bad hires and poor retention have made it clear for many companies that they need to hire better, but with many still relying on CVs and interviews it can be difficult to determine if someone will succeed in a position or not.

“There’s a lot more to a candidate than their education, experience, skills and past experiences. Today, the key to predicting future success and making the right hiring decisions is assessing candidates’ personality traits, something which is becoming increasingly important.

“Personality is a proven predictor of job performance and assessing candidates’ behavioural tendencies in a work environment enables recruiters to understand whether they will become top performers and thrive in their role, as well as fit into the culture of the company.”

“We recommend employers make more use of predictive hiring technology, which incorporate personality assessments to improve the quality of their hires in 2021. These assessments can help identify which traits are predictive of performance and engagement in the job they’re hiring for, and match profiles of candidates against these criteria.”

Nicolas Speeckaert highlights five key reasons for using personality assessments to improve recruitment in 2021:

Data-driven recruitment leads to better hiring decisions – Personality assessments provide employers with standardised and valuable insights into how candidates will behave at work and can predict job performance and company fit.

Unlike CV analysis or face to face interviews, a personality assessment allows companies to accurately assess important personality traits such as openness, conscientiousness and stability, as well as various characteristics such as sociability, leadership orientation, self-confidence and creative thinking.

Improves candidate screening at the top of the funnel – When combined with other types of assessments, such as motivation and cognitive ability, and structured interviews, the personality assessment provides powerful insights to improve the selection process. Using this at the start helps to screen out candidates that are not a good fit and makes it easier to focus only on the most promising profiles, and to identify and hire the best talent at the end.

Assess if a candidate has the ideal personality for a wide range of job categories – A personality assessment can successfully predict employee performance across a wide range of job categories. When hiring senior level executives for example companies will probably want to assess overall personality traits, but if they’re hiring a waiter they may be specifically interested in personality traits like sociability or conscientiousness.

Increases employee quality and retention – Companies can screen candidates more efficiently for aptitude and personality and assess whether a candidate is likely to stay in the role. Many factors are assessed such as passion for learning, ambition, initiative, empathy, communication skills, critical thinking skills, honesty, motivation and curiosity etc. Screening for these skills during a standard face-to-face interview can be extremely difficult.

Employees that aren’t the right fit for a job will eventually underperform in terms of engagement with the role and productivity, and will be more likely to leave which is costly and time consuming. A personality assessment can reduce hiring and training costs by providing data that will help hire the right people for a position the first time round.

Driving an evidence-based recruitment process increases legal defensibility – Using a personality assessment can increase the legal defensibility of the recruitment process as it provides employers with objective, scientifically validated predictors of success in a job, in opposition to other more subjective hiring methods. This gives companies a better chance of defending their hiring procedures if someone questions their hiring process legality.