In one sense, using personality assessments in hiring is nothing new. Writers Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers created their famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator during World War II. Inspired by groundbreaking Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung, the mother-daughter team achieved widespread influence with their assessment was adopted by the Educational Testing Service in 1962.
In the years since its advent, tens of millions of applicants for universities, government positions, and jobs have taking the Myers-Briggs test. It has generated its share of detractors over the years, as well as challengers who have worked to resolve some of the perceived flaws in its methodology. Indeed, not only does the Myers-Briggs test remain in circulation. The concept proliferated widely in many forms.
Building on, and Bettering, Myers-Briggs
The idea that you could create an instrument designed to yield a quantifiable measure for understanding individual personality types took root among universities and employers alike. The Myers-Briggs test has spawned countless imitators and inspired the efforts of its most vocal detractors. In the latter category, most of its critics proceeded with the goal of building upon its principles while improving upon its scientific weakness.
For instance, when Clemson Professors Fred Switzer and Jo Jorgensen set out to create their own personality assessment tool for Success Portraits, they aspired to correct what they perceived to be the fundamental flaws in Myers-Briggs. Specifically, says Switzer, “the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator may be the ultimate example of what appears to be a common cognitive bias—overcategorizing continuous variables. People don’t come in ‘types.’ That’s just a heuristic we use to make the world appear more predictable and therefore safer.”
Perspectives like this have helped to drive a more recent evolution in the use of personality assessments. Indeed, there is an argument that the value of personality assessments is higher today than ever before, as is our ability to create more meaningful, nuanced, and impactful assessments.
But that also means there are a lot of personality assessment strategies to choose from today–each with its own strengths and weaknesses. So how do you choose the right assessment tool for your business, and how can you integrate this tool into your hiring workflow?
In the guide that follows, we’ll provide insights to help you choose the right provider along with helpful tips for effectively implementing personality assessment in your hiring strategy.
The Current Hiring Landscape
As we pointed out above, employers face a uniquely challenging hiring landscape. As roles, technology, and employee expectations change, so does the hiring calculus. Both the cost and difficulty of acquiring talent have gone up.
According to an article from Indeed, 43% of surveyed employers say the #1 hiring challenge today is a lack of quality candidates. Respondents say that they receive a preponderance of applications for candidates that simply aren’t qualified for the job. This is not just a problem of staffing, but also of cost-management.
This is because the work of attracting, vetting, and screening prospective employees continues to rise in price as employers try to get their arms around an ever broader and more splintered digital recruitment landscape. The risk of investing capital in recruitment is growing ever steeper in an environment where employers are having difficulty connecting with the right talent.
In short, hiring is more expensive, but employers are not seeing the results. Separating the qualified candidates from those who don’t meet the job requirements is a tedious, time-consuming and imperfect system. And these realities are causing employers to question the effectiveness of current hiring conventions.
How can personality assessments help?
Personality testing offers employers another way of evaluating candidate qualifications, one that can refine the vetting process, improve employee retention, enhance team dynamics, and make positive contributions to your organizational culture. An effective personality assessment tool can help your organization navigate vital questions about the unique traits that demonstrate fitness for a given role, compatibility with an existing company culture, and the potential for growth within your organization.
To reiterate, we are in a hiring atmosphere where businesses are looking for ways to cut hiring costs while simultaneously improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the hiring process. Personality assessments can provide a powerful solution. The right testing tool will help you arrive at actionable metrics for the transferable 21st Century skills that can distinguish a bad hire from a long-term contributor, or even a future leader.
Remarkably though, according to the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, only 13% of companies surveyed use personality testing for their general hiring process. The same article points out that just 14% of employers use some form of managerial assessment for prospective leaders within their organizations.
This may be a missed opportunity to improve on hiring outcomes and an extremely affordable starting cost. But how can you integrate a personality assessment into your hiring process?
10 Steps for integrating a personality assessment into your hiring process
- Identify the qualities you need to test for, such as teamwork skills, leadership potential, creativity, self-regulation, etc.
- Choose the right personality assessment tool based on a combination of the traits measured and the academic rigor of the testing method, as well as its analytical and reporting capabilities.
- Ensure that you’ve taken ethical considerations into account, being mindful that any testing method you select is free from cultural, gender, or racial biases, that the results are applied equally and blindly to all candidates, and that your personality testing method is in compliance with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Uniform Guidelines.
- Incorporate testing into your hiring funnel at the appropriate place in your process, whether as a pre-screening filter for narrowing down the pool of viable candidates; as a post-interview tool for understanding the deeper personality traits of shortlisted candidates; or as a way of ensuring that new hires are being utilized in ways that capitalize on their strengths.
- Communicate clearly with candidates about the role that personality testing will play in the hiring process, the benefits it offers as an assessment tool, and the ethical and legal precautions you’ve taken to ensure fairness.
- Interpret results thoughtfully, using your findings as a complement to (rather than a replacement for) other proven tools like resumes and interviews.
- Leverage testing as part of a broader team-building strategy, using personality tests to evaluate how well a candidate’s traits align with your company culture
- Provide testing feedback to candidates where appropriate, especially for internal applicants or those who have gone through multiple rounds of interviews, as this type of transparency can foster greater loyalty and professional development.
- Use personality assessment insights to support onboarding and development, tailoring both processes to identify areas where new employees might need coaching, training, or mentoring to enhance their skills or adapt to their roles.
- Gather data on hiring outcomes including performance metrics, hiring ROI, and retention, and use these findings to assess the effectiveness of your personality assessment strategy, and to drive potential improvements in your program.
Tips for selecting the best personality assessment for your business
Now that you know how to incorporate personality assessment into your hiring strategy, what should you look for in an effective personality assessment tool?
There are a number of essential factors to consider. Reliability and validity are particularly important, which is why the Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) was created by Clemson University industrial-organizational (or I-O) psychology professors Fred Switzer and Jo Jorgensen with a focus on proven strategies for qualitative assessment. With 192 targeted questions spanning 19 essential traits in 4 key professional situations, the SPPT is designed both to score test-takers on their individual traits and to reveal how these traits manifest as predictors of success in real-life situations.
The SPPT goes beyond traditional testing methods by contextualizing individual personality traits like Cooperation, Achievement Striving, Social Intelligence, and Core Self-Evaluation in an array of expected work situations including independent work, teamwork, leadership work, and work alongside a higher-up. This nuanced approach to personality assessment can facilitate smarter hiring decisions, more effective team building strategies, and enhanced leadership development.
As noted in the section above, it is still essential to approach the use of personality assessments in hiring with care and caution. Personality assessments, such as the SPPT, can provide valuable insights into workplace competencies. However, the consequent reporting is not meant to serve as a definitive guide for employment decisions. Broadly speaking, personality tests are meant to be used as a supplemental tool, alongside other objective measures of qualifications, skills, and experience. The scores on a personality assessment are not meant to be the determining factor for hiring.
Therefore, using the results from a personality assessment for hiring purposes must be done in compliance with all relevant laws, including the EEOC’s Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures.
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Find out how the SPPT can help refine your approach to hiring and help drive organization-wide improvements.