White Paper: The power of personality assessments in team building, hiring and performance


Table of Contents

  1. Executive Summary
  2. Introduction
  3. Personality tests used in hiring
  4. Examples of Workplace Personality Assessments
  5. Importance of personality assessments in recruitment and selection
  6. How to use personality assessments when building your team
  7. What is the importance of personality assessments on performance
  8. How to use personality assessments when building your team
  9. What is the importance of personality assessments on performance

1. An Executive Summary

It is critical for recruiters to gather all pertinent information about applicants throughout the recruitment process to make the best judgment when hiring new candidates. However, conventional data collection techniques are very subjective and inaccurate, which is why pre-selection evaluations are critical to the recruiting process. This is where companies like Drake P3 and CliftonStrengths Assessment come in by playing a vital role in making the best decision possible when hiring people, building a team, and assessing their performance. Personality testing is something all Management companies, vessels, and fleets can benefit tremendously from. A personality assessment may give recruiters in-depth insights that, when paired with other parts of the evaluation process (CV, interview, etc.), can greatly enhance applicant selection.


2. Introduction

A candidate is much more than their degree, expertise, talents, and prior experiences. Today, the critical factor in forecasting future performance and making the best recruiting selection is evaluating individuals’ personality attributes, which is becoming more significant. Personality is a well-established predictor of job success, and evaluating applicants’ behavioral patterns in a work setting helps recruiters to determine if they will develop into top performers and succeed in their roles, as well as fit into the company’s culture.


3. Can personality tests be used in hiring?

Personality assessments provide a shared vocabulary for framing identity and fostering communication and trust. When considering whether to have your team take a shared personality test, the best way to ensure success is to think about the rationale for the assessment. Understanding differences fosters empathy, which in turn fosters the development of emotional intelligence, which adds to team productivity, happiness, and retention. Along with cultivating an empathic culture, you may choose to enhance certain areas of your collaboration, increase communication via a common language, or assess each member’s team fit to ensure everyone is (ideally) satisfied with their job (Ryder, 2020).

Personality characteristics are not as evident or apparent as physical characteristics. As such, developing personality tests is a time-consuming procedure. This method includes doing research, gaining an understanding of human psychology, and validating the findings. Constructs encompass concepts such as dominance, anxiety, emotionality, and motivation. It is critical to see these structures in terms of a sliding scale. This method is critical since various personality tests examine different facets of personality. Before deciding on a personality assessment method, ensure that the data obtained offers the company the sort of knowledge it needs to accomplish its objectives (Knilans,2021).


4. Examples of Workplace Personality Assessments

Following the last paragraph, we can see why trusting already existing and tested companies is vital for your selection process. Here we go over two of them:

The Drake P3 method, which was developed in-house by a team of organizational psychologists, is a multi-purpose assessment tool that enables you to locate, select, manage, motivate, and retain talent. The first 15-20-minute evaluation survey, which integrates user-friendly web technology and behavioral psychology, offers 100 adjectives with which people may identify themselves. At the touch of a button, the replies are subsequently analyzed via 14,000 statistical computations. Drake P3 identifies a person’s inherent behavioral inclinations and assesses the four most predictive personality qualities for professional success and cultural fit: dominance, extraversion, patience, and conformity. Additionally, the survey assesses communication styles, emotional intelligence, motivational requirements, decision-making ability, stress, energy, and learning styles (Drake P3, 2022).

CliftonStrengths Assessment is conducted by completing the online talent assessment (formerly known as the Clifton StrengthsFinder): find what you naturally excel at, discover how to transform your finest abilities into strengths, enhance your potential by using your specific results and reports (Gallup, 2021). The global strengths movement began six decades ago with a simple question made by Don Clifton: “What would happen if we looked at what individuals do well against what they do wrong?”


5. Why are personality assessments important for recruitment?

They establish data-driven recruitment and that results in more informed recruiting choices. – Employers will receive significant insight into how applicants will perform at work via personality evaluations, which may also predict job success and business fit. Unlike CV analysis or in-person interviews, a personality assessment enables employers to accurately assess critical personality traits such as openness, conscientiousness, and stability, as well as a variety of other characteristics such as sociability, leadership orientation, self-confidence, and creative thinking.

They determine if an applicant has the perfect personality for a variety of job categories — A personality evaluation is capable of accurately predicting employee performance across a broad variety of job categories. For example, when employing top-level executives, firms will likely want to analyse general personality qualities; yet, when hiring a waiter, they may be more concerned with particular personality traits such as friendliness or conscientiousness.

They increase employee quality and retention – Businesses can effectively screen applicants for aptitude and personality traits, as well as determine if a candidate is likely to remain in the post. Numerous criteria are considered, including a desire to learn, ambition, initiative, empathy, communication abilities, critical thinking abilities, honesty, motivation, and curiosity, among others. It might be incredibly difficult to screen for these abilities during a typical face-to-face interview. Employees who are not a good match for a position will ultimately perform poorly in terms of engagement and productivity and will be more likely to quit, which is expensive and time-consuming. A personality evaluation may help employers save money on recruiting and training by giving data that enables them to hire the appropriate individuals the first time.

They improve legal defensibility by using an evidence-based recruiting procedure – Employing a personality evaluation may help management companies defend their recruiting practices more legally, since it offers employers objective, scientifically verified indicators of employment performance, in contrast to more subjective hiring procedures. This provides companies a greater chance of defending their recruiting methods if their legality is challenged (Speeckaert, 2021).


6. How to use personality tests to build a productive team?

Psychological preferences, temperaments, and predispositions all contribute to one’s personality. And, although a variety of things impact us (including societal and cultural forces), our habits, actions, and attitudes are mostly determined by our personalities. As a result, it’s unsurprising that some personality tests may be an excellent predictor of work success. Consider two candidates who are equivalent in terms of cognitive capacity, education, and experience – a person who scores lower on the ‘flexibility’ measure may be less at ease fulfilling the tasks of a sales role. On the other side, this flexibility score may be advantageous for accounting, which requires a high degree of organization and discipline and little decision-making uncertainty (Haynie, 2021). You can consider this when building a productive team by adapting it to everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. To be successful, a firm must have a balance of personality types. While outgoing and creative personnel are beneficial for morale and coming up with new and inventive ways to bring a company forward, without more focused people to keep them on track, these ideas may never be fulfilled (Verlinden, 2021).


7. What is the importance of personality assessment on performance?

Personality psychology comes down to this: every one of us has unique personality characteristics, and we seek to discover and quantify these characteristics in order to anticipate how they influence our behavior and attitudes. This is very intricate and crude due to the fact that so many different things influence our personalities, such as biology, culture, environment, emotion, and memory. However, attempting to understand your personality might be important, particularly if you’re dealing with other people. Each member of a group contributes a unique mix of information, talents, and characteristics—but collaborating across diverse preferences, dislikes, and working styles is a taught skill that begins with introspection. Good performance relies on understanding of these characteristics and personalities. Today, management companies use a variety of tools and tests for people and groups to aid in the recruiting and team-building process (Colman, 2021).


References

Colman, G. (2021, April 19). How to use personality tests to build a productive team. Zapier. https://zapier.com/blog/personality-tests/ 

Drake P3 Overview | Personality and Behavioural Assessment Tool. (2022). Drake P3. https://drakep3.com/product/overview/ 

Gallup, Inc. (2021, July 19). How the CliftonStrengths Assessment Works | EN – Gallup. Gallup.Com. https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253676/how-cliftonstrengths-works.aspx 

Haynie, S. (2021, December 10). Should Personality Assessments Be Used In Hiring? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2021/06/03/should-personality-assessments-be-used-in-hiring/?sh=4d87587437c0 

Knilans, G. (2021, January 12). The Role of Personality Assessments in Building Strong Teams. Trade Press Services. https://www.tradepressservices.com/personality-assessments/ 

Ryder, L. (2020, December 23). The Surprising Power Of Personality Tests For Teams At Work. Trello. https://blog.trello.com/personality-tests-for-teams-at-work 

Speeckaert, S. C. N.-. (2021). Why personality assessments are more important than ever. theHRDIRECTOR. https://www.thehrdirector.com/business-news/recruitment/five-reasons-why-personality-assessments-could-lead-to-more-successful-hires-in-2021/ 

Verlinden, N. (2021, June 2). How Personality Tests Can Help Build Productive Teams. AIHR. https://www.aihr.com/blog/personality-tests-can-help-build-productive-teams/