Personality tests for hiring: What does HR need to learn?
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Businesses thrive because of their people, so when it comes to hiring and recruitment, the stakes are incredibly high.
Bring in the wrong element, and you could not only damage your company culture, but also accrue costs as you have to spend more time and resources interviewing a second round of candidates.
A big factor in finding matches for your company is personality.
Among other things, personality determines:
- If someone’s a team player
- If they’re helpful
- If they’re kind
- How they approach specific situations
- The conditions in which they will do well in
All of these factors are crucial in how someone will gel in a team, so you need to be looking for new ways to quantify this.
This is where pre-employment personality tests can become an indispensable hiring instrument, and in this article, we’ll tell you all about them: the different types, matching them to the role you’re hiring for, and how to measure their return on investment (ROI) over time to help you improve your strategy.
The benefits of using personality tests for hiring
Customising a personality test that’s bespoke to your company culture and is also role specific is giving you a deeper insight into your candidate.
A good CV, a nice smile, and a firm handshake can really sway people and make a great first impression, but first impressions can be deceiving. For dramatic examples, consider the Trojan Horse, or how many serial killers were reported to be extremely charming and charismatic.
Now, obviously, you’re not overly concerned with mass murderers or the Ancient Greek equivalent of the Green Berets jumping out of a new employee/ mannequin, but bullies, technophobes, and people who lack the temperament to fit in and add to your company culture – these are real red flags you could raise through a well constructed personality test.
Of course, these aren’t things you would act on by their own merit, but they’re an indicator. They may confirm your gut instinct – that someone is going to be a great fit, or they might encourage you to re-evaluate your experience of meeting a candidate, and really examine your perception of them.
If used as part of a full battery of psychometric testing prior to interview, in conjunction with CVs and covering letters or application forms, this can even be used to limit the number of candidates to be interviewed, making the hiring process more efficient.
Personality test types: What’s important to your business?
Okay, cool, personality tests then… but how do we measure someone’s personality?
There are a few different approaches you could take when building your personality test. Which one you take will depend entirely on what’s important to your organisation and the role you’re advertising for.
Trait-based personality tests
Trait-based personality testing is a self-assessment questionnaire on “how much of” specific traits they have.
For example, in the “Big Five” model, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are the traits individuals assess themselves on.
The results create a pattern that indicates the participant’s personality.
A major issue with this approach is that it’s very open to “desirability bias” – by which we mean it’s obviously desirable to be conscientious, so it’s tempting to say you’re more conscientious than you are to have a more desirable result.
This sort of thing is useful for self-reflection, but possibly unhelpful for hiring.
Type-based personality tests
This is the kind of personality test you can easily customise for yourself on Drimify.
This is where you build pre-defined personality types. They’re not necessarily more desirable than one another, but different. For example:
- Collaborator
- Innovator
- Leader
- Workhorse
Then the answers to your questions each correspond to a different personality type profile.
Again, the questions here aren’t black and white – there’s nuance to them.
The idea is that with enough questions, you can categorise the respondent’s personality type.
In the case of a custom-built personality assessment, you can even use your best employees as the blueprint. For example, if a recurring personality type excels in your organisation in specific departments, look at the patterns and build a personality profile around them.
Over time and with enough data, these can offer phenomenal insights into the temperaments of your workforce.
Behavioural assessment personality tests
So this is essentially a type-based personality test, but all the questions will be built around posing a specific scenario, and asking in the questions what action the respondent would take to find a resolution (or perhaps not find a resolution, depending on the content and their personality type).
This approach can be a lot more work and job-specific than asking questions like: “Which of the following words most describes your character?”
Choosing the right approach for the role you’re hiring for
A lot of businesses do ultimately opt for trait-based personality tests, but these are typically more useful components of psychometric testing on your existing employees, when used more as a self-reflection and development tool, as opposed to a screening tool.
The most closed-minded person in the world will give themselves the highest score for openness if them getting an interview may depend on it, so it becomes too game-able to be used in pre-employment.
The type and behavioural assessment personality tests are a much more appropriate approach, and can be tailored to be so much more applicable to your business.
Measure the ROI of your personality tests in your recruitment strategy
Personality tests for recruitment – be they your own custom-builds or an existing personality test like the “Big Five” or the Myers-Briggs tests – accrue a lot of data, but to really determine their efficacy and your ROI, you’ll need to look at certain measures and benchmarks.
Exactly what these will look like will depend on the size of your business and how much pre-existing data you have to compare, but the main thing to look at is how much your employee retention rate improves.
All games and experiences built on the Drimify gamification platform will give you measures like views, engagement rate, and completion rate, but with personality tests for recruitment, your north star metric should really lie outside of your dashboard and in retention.
A secondary KPI could be a calculation based on how many people you’re interviewing per position against the number of hires that pass their probation period, or stay past a year.
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