April 13, 11:07 am
Would you hire based on personality type?
Recently someone asked me, “Would you hire someone based on his or her personality type?”
My answer was “no, not based SOLELY on personality type,” but most certainly I advocate and use assessment tools in the screening, hiring, and training process.
Why? Because over the past 22 years I have personally interviewed over 2,000 people. Between my own experiences and talking with others, I know that someone desperate for a job can “snowball” an interviewer. The unfortunate result: Those people get fired three months later when they’ve clearly demonstrated they’re not a good fit for the job.
Let’s offer up a different question: “If the job could talk, what kind of person would it want?”
Bill Bonnstetter, founder of Target Training International, has developed a series of assessment tools for benchmarking jobs to identify the best type of person for a particular job.
Brief synopsis of how it works: People who are already top performers in a job answer questions about the job to create a benchmark, or what I call an “ideal candidate profile.” From the profile, applicants who get to a certain point in the interview process can be assessed and compared to the benchmark.
Again, I would not make a hire SOLELY on the assessment results, but the tools are certainly an integral part of my process.
The reason I’m a believer is because Bonnstetter’s assessment tools have an amazing success rate. When companies use them as part of their screening process, 92 percent of those hired are still on the job one year later. According to recent statistics, that’s about twice the national average of those hired without assessments.
Here’s a 16-slide presentation on the process
Here’s a link to find out more about Bonnstetter’s assessment tools available though my company.
Filed in Team Building, Workplace, Interviewing, Retention, Personality Test, Human Resource Management
At my company, we are placing ever-increasing importance on not just WHAT people can do, but HOW they go about doing it.
So this is indeed referring to personality is many ways. Personally, I would rather take someone one with the right personality/ less skills, than the other way round.
You can always teach people the skills, but changing behaviour/ personality is a different matter entirely.