Having a well-written CV and seeming confident in a face-to-face interview isn’t enough to get a job anymore. The high costs of bad hires and high turnover rates have made it clear for companies that they need to hire better. In fact, it is estimated that up to 75% of all hiring decisions result in a mis-hire. In most cases, making a wrong hiring decision can cost a company up to roughly 3.5 x the employee’s annual salary which clearly has a negative impact on business.
As such, screening candidates based on their CV only is not the right way to drive the selection process. There’s more to a candidate than education and experience and hard skills and past experiences are getting less relevant every day. Today, the key is to be able to predict future success to make the right hiring decisions.
Therefore, organisations need to run evidence-based talent acquisition. Finding the most suitable candidate for a specific position requires companies to innovate in the way they screen, assess and select candidates so they can hire the right candidate for the job.
Thanks to the automated candidate screening and soft skills assessments, predictive hiring technology can help improve the quality of hire. AI-based predictive hiring allows companies to identify which traits are predictive of performance and engagement in the job they’re hiring for and to match the profiles of candidates against that predictive model.
Personality as a Predictor of Future Job Success
Personality is a scientifically-proven predictor of job performance and assessing the candidates' behavioural tendencies in a work environment allows recruiters to understand whether they will, in fact, be top performers and whether they'll the culture of the company.
A personality assessment beats the traditional methods of gathering information and provides recruiters with objective insights that significantly improve the candidate selection. Research shows that personality measures are useful predictors of future job performance and questionnaires based on the scientifically proven "Big Five" theoretical model, for instance, provide insightful information about how the candidates’ personality will impact their workplace behaviour allowing recruiters to understand how candidates relate to others, how they approach and solve problems and how they manage their emotions.
Moreover, a 2016 study by Frank L. Schmidt, which explores practical and theoretical implications of 100 years of research findings regarding selection methods in personnel psychology, found that job experience alone only allows predicting job performance with 16% accuracy, whereas the combination of cognitive ability and personality allows 78% accuracy in future performance prediction.
Here are 5 reasons you should use personality assessment to improve your recruitment:
A data-driven recruitment leads to better hiring decisions
It provides objective data that enables better decision-making. Personality assessment provides you with standardised, useful insights regarding how candidates behave in a work context and predict job performance and company fit. By using this data to identify and hire the right candidate you’ll also improve the overall productivity and effectiveness of your teams.
Unlike CV analysis or face to face interviews, a personality assessment allows you to accurately assess important personality traits of the candidate like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and stability and various characteristics such as sociability, need for recognition, leadership orientation, cooperation, consideration, dependability, efficiency, even-temperament, achievement striving, self-confidence, abstract thinking and creative thinking.
Using personality assessment improves candidate screening at the top of the funnel
Using personality assessment to screen candidates early on significantly improves your selection process. 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 selction process and inform the recruiters’ decisions.
Applying it at the beginning of the process, and not at the end, helps to screen out candidates that are not a good fit at all. This makes it easier for recruiters to focus only on the most promising profiles throughout the selection process and to identify and hire the best talent at the end.
It’s possible to assess if a candidate has the ideal personality regarding a wide range of job categories
Research shows that well developed personality assessment can successfully predict employee performance across the wide range of job categories. What you are looking for in a candidate may vary depending on the department or industry you are hiring for. For hiring senior level executives you’ll probably want to assess overall personality traits, but if you’re hiring a waiter maybe you’ll be specifically interested in personality traits like sociability or conscientiousness.
However, no matter what the traits you’re more interested in, if you use a normative personality assessment, it’s possible to quickly compare candidates’ scores, which helps not only individually assessing a candidate, but also to compare him with all the candidates competing for the same position.
Finding the most suitable candidates increases employee quality and retention
As important as hiring the right candidate, it’s crucial for companies to retain talent and reduce turnover. With personality assessment, you can screen candidates more efficiently for aptitude and personality and assess whether a candidate is likely to stay in the role and fit in with the company culture.
To assess if candidates are fit for a position, there are many factors that can be considered such as passion for learning; overall ambition; ownership and initiative; empathy; communication skills; critical thinking skills; collaboration skills; honesty; motivation; 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, thus, are more likely to leave. And as you well know, replacing a bad hire can be very expensive and time-consuming. But using personality assessment in your recruitment can reduce costs on hiring and training costs by providing you with data that will help you hire the right people for a position the first time.
Driving an evidence-based recruitment process increases legal defensibility
Using personality assessment can increase the legal defensibility of your recruitment process. Of course, you must follow the same guidelines as any other hiring selection method (including resumes, interviews, etc.), which means that this kind of assessment is completely legal to use as long as it is job-related.
If you employ a well-designed and reliable assessment in your recruitment, you’ll add a layer of legal defensibility to the process, given the fact that it provides employers with objective, scientifically validated predictors of success in a job, in opposition to other subjective hiring methods. This actually gives companies a chance to better defend their hiring procedures if someone questions their hiring process legality.
For all these reasons, here at skeeled, we promote the use of the personality test as a way of assessing candidates' personality traits during the recruitment process, so that recruiters have a better understanding regarding how a candidate's personality can influence job satisfaction and performance and find the right candidate for a specific job.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
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