But when we’re investigating the tools on the market that provide behavioral reports on candidates, what should we be looking for? What determines a “best in class” tool? How do we know whether the tool we’re reviewing is a measuring the competencies we care about?

How Personality Works

The most widely-accepted psychological model of personality is called the Big Five. The Big Five describes the five major traits that come together to make up who we are. Within each major personality factor that makes up the Big Five, there are smaller personality facets, which measure one element of a personality factor.

For example, within the Agreeableness factor, there are several facets, such as, trust, morality, sympathy, and cooperation. Each of those (and more) come together to give a broad overview of a candidate’s “Agreeableness.” All of the other major factors that comprise the Big Five also have facets that come together to make the broad trait described in the factor.

The Same Personality Element Can Have Wildly Different Results

Here’s a question for you: If you are hiring a manager or senior business leader in charge of a team, would you prefer to select a candidate with great openness and creativity, able to see new opportunities and adopt a highly adaptive approach? Or would you prefer a candidate with little ability to think “outside the box”?

If you’re like most of our clients, you responded in favor of the candidate with great openness.

You would be wrong.

As it turns out, managers that are extremely open have a schizophrenic leadership style – they too often seek to switch gears and lack the ability to stay the course once a decision has been made for the team to attack.

Extreme openness works very well for front line creatives and others whose job requires great inspiration and a desire to tread new ground.

Bringing Personality Back to the Job in Question

The key decision criterion for a behavioral assessment tool is whether that tool takes the candidate’s behavioral information and relates it back to the job in question. Without that contextualization, you risk using your intuition to select candidates, rather than hard data from wide research about what actually works in the market.

If you’re using a tool like ConnectCubed, each assessment is directly relevant to the role. Rather than learning about a candidate’s Agreeableness, you’ll receive information on how that candidate will work with customers or with others in a team.

If the candidate is being considered for a managerial role, you’ll know whether that individual has the ability to make hard decisions and prioritize getting the job done over minor the immediate preferences of her direct reports.

Have you seen similar personality elements fail in two different roles? What has your process been for selecting new assessment technology at your company? What are the key decision factors that lead you to pick one tool over another?

Leverage thousands of tests from leading assessment vendors (such as ConnectCubed) through the SmartRecruiters Assessment Center.

Traditional hiring practices tell us that professional experience is one of the most important assets when determining which candidates are the best your organizational needs. Experience, education and overall presentation are the most attractive traits to an employer. But where does personality fall in the list of valuable skills?

You may be surprised but more and more hiring assessments are proclaiming personality is the most valuable skill. Assessment tools are used to determine what makes the best candidate for a desired position. You’ve probably taken a Myers Briggs personality test at some point in your career. The results or data from these types of tests helps an employer determine if a candidate is a good fit or crazier than Kat Williams.

The traditional difference between personality and skill is that skills can be taught and personality can’t.  While personalities do evolve over time, I see it as, you either have a great personality or you don’t. Why is a great personality so important? Let’s take a quick a poll! Who wants to work with someone who is difficult to communicate with, defensive minded and rude? Anyone? Didn’t think so! One of the main reason people quit their jobs is because conflict with co-workers, so that makes “fit” imperative to organization success.

Many jobs require a team dynamic – working together; cross trained to perform multiple duties are common. There is a shift to service –we are learning that companies that provide great customer service excel over companies that don’t. This is important because hiring managers are looking for good personalities to work in their cross-functional teams to interact with internal and external customers.

So here’s a few more examples of how hiring for personality can help you.

• Increased hiring efficiency – Employees that fit in well from an attitude perspective are more likely to stick around for a while. A lower turnover ratio means your hiring process is working quite well.

• Reduced negative attrition – This is closely related to turnover but slightly different, because some attrition is good. Yes, from a business standpoint you want positive movement in your organization, you know promotions and growth. However you don’t want to lose the good people – only the bad hires, so when you have a close knit team which has opportunities to advance, you have happy engaged employees.

• ROI – The decisions to hire new staff is a costly one, and every company hopes that a new employee will fit in with the company so they can reap a return on investment. Remember we’re talking training, compensation and benefits.

It’s simple:

good workers = good teams;
good teams = good products;
good products + good service = customer loyality, great word of mouth and more market share.

Chris Fields is an HR professional and leadership guy who blogs and dispenses great (not just good) advice at Cost of Work. Connect with Chris via email at chris@costofwork.com.