5 Things You Need to Know About Implementing Personality Assessments

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KayakPersonality assessments  can do everything from foster connections between colleagues to build powerful teams and determine how well candidates fit within your established culture.

That being said, it can be quite tricky to actually integrate these assessments into your hiring process, especially if you’ve never dealt with them extensively.

If you’re in need of some guidance when it comes to personality assessments, here are a few lessons we’ve learned as a company that should help you when it comes time to bring personality assessments into your workplace:

1. You’re in Good Company

The majority of organizations – between 60 and 70 percent of them, according to some estimates  – use personality assessments to evaluate employees. As more and more companies begin to warm up to the idea that “fit” is more than just a combination of job experience, training, and skills, they are turning to personality assessments to help them truly evaluate candidates in useful and accurate ways. Many of today’s top organizations have found personality assessments to be invaluable tools in their hiring processes.

2. They Need to Be Fair

Personality assessments are one of the best ways to evaluate whether or not a given candidate is going to fit in at your company – but only if you assessments measure everyone against the same criteria, and only if those criteria are fair to diverse groups of people. Otherwise, you may make some truly poor hiring decisions based on inaccurate data.

Oh, and one more thing: If your personality assessments do not fairly measure all candidates by the same objective and unprejudiced metrics, then you may be leaving yourself open to lawsuits from candidates who feel your organization discriminated against them due to their background or ethnicity.

Be very careful that your personality assessments all abide by federal and state hiring laws!

3. Hiring Might Take a Bit Longer, But It Will Be Worth It

Once you’ve incorporated personality assessments into your hiring process, you might find that some seemingly Graphqualified candidates don’t meet your new, more demanding standards. As a result, it may take longer than you’re used to to find candidate who do make the cut – but don’t worry, because this is a good thing.

See, personality assessments are helping you set the bar higher. Fewer candidates will be able to meet this bar, but the ones who do will be great cultural fits.

You can also think of it as a trade-off: You may be increasing your time-to-hire a bit, but in exchange, you can lower your turnover by as much as 12 percent.

4. They Let Everyone Shine

For a long time, many employers thought that extroverts were always better sales candidates than introverts. The argument, which seems sound on the surface, is that an extrovert’s outgoing personality would help them make more and better sales, whereas an introvert’s quieter personality would prevent them from inspiring others to buy a company’s products.

Studies have shown this to be patently untrue. In actuality, it is the “ambivert” — the person who has a mixture of introverted and extroverted qualities — who makes the best salesperson. Personality assessments can help these ambiverts shine brightly where they might otherwise be buried under a sea of enthusiastic extroverts.

Of course, the foregoing is just an example of one of the ways in which personality assessments can help employers find great candidates they may have otherwise missed. Personality assessments let everybody shine in their own way, giving organizations fuller pictures of their talent pipelines.

5. They Are More Accurate Than You Might Think

This all sounds well and good, but couldn’t candidates fake their answers on these tests, making them inaccurate and useless?

The answer is: No, not really. Although candidates could try to answer questions according to what they think employers want to hear, rather than according to the truth, most personality assessments are aware that candidates sometimes try to do this. These assessments actually take into account candidates’ attempts to outsmart them and produce accurate resulJetts – even when the candidates are not being totally honest! Personality assessments don’t really have “right” or “wrong” answers – they just give insight into what a candidate is like.

Bringing a personality assessment into your hiring process may feel intimidating, but don’t worry! As long as you know what to expect, you’ll be setting yourself up for hiring success.

By Maren Hogan