Bishal Mukherjee

Hiring a Manager? Use personality assessment questions to recruit the best. Recruiting and retention is not every man’s cup of tea. But the difficulty increases manifold when a company is trying to hire for an open position in the Management. There would be dozens of candidates matching the required qualifications, experience etc. Most employers have a question – what should I choose, skills or personality? So, as first step in your hiring process would filter out the best talent, adequate talent etc from the lot. Correct? Management professionals are mostly educated from recognized B-schools and they carry a varied and vast experience alongside. But, are certifications and experiences enough? What about the personality traits? Are you hiring the right manager? Well, these candidates are obviously screened through multiple rounds of interviews checking their vocabulary, comprehension, aptitude, logical reasoning and many such skills. But, most companies do not opt for the personality assessment round. When it comes to hiring a great employee, an employer should check for the candidate with a personality that fits his/her company’s culture. You can always try and teach skills to an employee but training people on their personality is difficult. Most companies, in the recent years, have come to realize that most failed hires were not as a result of recruited individuals not performing their duties but because they weren’t able to gel well in the culture. When an employee doesn’t ‘fit’ into an organization, it leads to clashes, communication gaps, relationship issue in the workplace. This leads to non performance and loss. So, a round of personality assessment should be included as part of the recruitment process. Let us talk in-depth about the same. As a matter of fact, resumes, interviews, and tests don’t tell the recruiter much about the candidate’s integrity, interpersonal style, pressure handling, adaptability and similar traits. No matter what a candidate does include the statement “Adaptable” in their resume. But, are they really? A quick personality test on the other hand will predict his/her way of working. Personality tests also let you know the manner and style in which an individual works with others – clients and/or colleagues. Believe me when I say stress-prone, moody employees put up negative vibes which impact the entire staff’s morale. Employers spend a couple of hours with the prospect before hiring them. This is not enough to fully understand the prospect as an individual. So, employers should opt for Type Indicator or general psychometric tests. The concept of these tests is pretty straightforward – these are used to determine an employee’s personal attributes and interpersonal/social skills based on a set of questionnaires. The employer can use relevant questions to determine if the candidate has the desired personality traits required for the company and if they would be a good fit. For an example: you are looking for a Customer Support Manager to manage ethnically and culturally apart teams in different time zones around the globe. You will obviously be looking for the candidate with outstanding technical, communication and managerial skills. Yes, these are necessary qualities but apart from these you should also be checking if the desired candidate has cultural sensibility/awareness as well as the adaptability to work with teams in different time zones. So, a resume can’t help you determine these, but a personality assessment can. How Personality Assessment can help filter the crème de la crème? Other than the above, personality assessments can be used as a valuable tool by hiring managers to develop and mentor the prospects. As the selected candidates go through this round, the hiring manager would have an understanding of the newly recruited candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. This helps the hiring manager to place employees in the right profiles and provide them the right training/coaching right from the start. Understanding preferred work styles and placing recruits accordingly is one of the major pillars to enhanced productivity. For a leadership/managerial profile, one of the most important personal traits to look for is Emotional Quotient (EQ) or Empathy. But, that can’t be measured through most assessments. Similarly other traits pre-dominant for managerial roles are intellectual curiosity, relationship management, self-regulation etc can’t be determined through resume and/or skill tests. These are critical traits or soft skills required to excel as a manager/leader. These tests provide data in an objective and measurable format that can be used to derive a better all-round view on the sustainability of the employee. Thus, a standard test helps in narrowing the pool of candidates and eases the process of selection of candidates to be invited for the face-to-face round. These tests also help the recruiter to decide they want to ask the candidates per their assessment results. Conclusion While not perfect, these personality assessment tests do stand up for something. The tests are helpful when it comes to analyzing the “more hidden” aspects of an individual. However, the most important factor is that recruiters should not only rely on personality assessment but use it as a supplement with other aptitude and logical tests. Above all, it is to be noted that need for personality assessment tests should solely be based on what is right for the business.