Filling empty positions at your company is not an easy feat, no matter how long you have been a part of the recruitment process. Part of it boils down to the fact that you need to find someone who is not only skilled but also whose work personality fits your company culture.
Not easy, right?
This is why the prescreening process is a crucial step in discovering your candidates’ true work personality.
While you can never truly predict how a particular new hire will fit in with the company culture and the management team, you can get a pretty good guess with the high-quality recruitment tools we are going to discuss in this article.
Understanding pre-employment assessments
For the recruiters looking for an objective way to assess possible employees, a pre-employment assessment is a good place to start. These are generally some sort of questionnaire that gives you an insight into the true work personality of the candidate.
Tests look at many aspects such as the cognitive ability and the critical thinking skills of the employee. Plus, there are tests that gauge honesty, personality type, and the things that motivate the candidate.
While there are many different assessments available out there nowadays, there are a few in particular that offer scientifically reliable results. More and more companies are choosing to use assessments to help them choose employees with a work personality that fits in with the culture of the company.
3 simplified benefits of pre-employment assessments
There are main three reasons why using pre-employment tests are essential to the hiring process:
- They offer objectivity. It’s best if recruiters and HR teams use objective data when making hiring decisions. Questionnaires and assessments are pre-employment tools that can give standardized data. (Hint: Plan out interview questions to ask your candidates beforehand.) This data can be used to predict whether the employee will get along with their potential coworkers and thrive under their management team.
- They increase retention. Once you have managed to snag the perfect employee for your available roles, you want to be able to retain that person for the long haul. A pre-assessment allows you to look at the personality type of the employee as well as what motivates and inspires them. Employees that aren’t a good fit for their position or who don’t feel appreciated in their role will be less likely to stick around, thus starting the hiring process all over again and wasting money on acquisition and training.
- They solidify your legal back up. When a pre-assessment tool is used in an ethical way, it can actually make your hiring process more objective. This gives you an edge legally as it provides actual analytics as to why particular people were hired or passed over.
How to match work personality to roles
Having the right education and the proper experience are both good reasons for considering a candidate for employment. But all the technical skills in the world won’t matter very much if the work personality of the candidate doesn’t mesh well with your company culture.
It is just as important that your candidates have the right attitude as it is for them to have the proper skills.
For instance, if your company is super laid back, and everyone is supposed to be responsible for their own output with minimal oversight, a person that needs regular validation from their superiors is not well-suited for your environment.
On the other hand, an employee that chafes under a micromanaging supervisor won’t do well on a team with a very hands-on approach.
Choosing a pre-assessment tool that gives you the insight you need to hire the right employees for the right roles will make recruiting a much smoother process.
Consider the following assessments, and see if one (or more) of them will provide you the data you seek.
The Myers-Briggs type indicator
This is one of the classic personality tests that has been used by companies to assess the work personality of potential employees for decades. While the science behind the test may be a little shaky, it is still often used to delve into the strengths and weaknesses of a company’s team members.
The process involves answering 88 questions if you are taking the European version or 93 questions if you are taking the American version.
The answers are then evaluated, and the applicant is given a personality type based on these four dichotomies:
- Extrovert or introvert
- Sensing or intuition
- Thinking or feeling
- Judging or perceiving
If you have ever heard someone refer to themselves as an ENFJ or an INTP, then they were referring to their score on the Myers-Briggs test.
The information gathered here is supposed to help you, as the recruiter, decide whether the candidate is the best fit. However, there isn’t a wrong or right personality type, just one that may be more suited for your company’s vibe.
Screening questionnaires
For those that want more creativity or flexibility in accessing the work personality of their potential candidates, using questionnaires in your application process may be a good option.
Your ATS should be able to provide customizable questionnaires that you can tack on to your application process.
Recruitee even offers questionnaires where you can add video answers in addition to the more traditional answering methods.
HR departments can create an assessment that asks all the questions they deem to be pertinent, and then customize the way the questions are answered. The choices include:
- Video Answer: The candidate must respond to the question with a short video response which allows you to get a good feel for their personality.
- Text: When the responses are more personal and complex, text boxes can be added for free typing the answers.
- Yes or No: This is a good way of flying through questions that are pertinent but don’t need a whole lot of insight, such as “are you licensed in XYZ?”.
- Multiple Choice: This is a good way to have people answer questions about their education level or fluent languages.
- Drop Down: If there are too many options, multiple choice can make a page look cluttered. Switching to a drop-down menu is more appropriate.
- Scale rating: These are often used for questions that ask how strongly a person agrees or disagrees with a statement, but they can be used for other more creative questions as well.
Once you have created your customized candidate assessment, it can be delivered in multiple ways.
- You can send the link straight to the potential employee’s email.
- It can be added to the candidate’s profile.
- You can assign the questionnaire to multiple candidates at once.
- You can add it to a job pipeline.
This is a very intuitive application that allows you to have a higher level of control over your assessments and the hiring process as a whole.
The EQ-i 2.0
The EQ-i 2.0 assessment was designed by Multi-Health Systems, Inc, and it was created to help employers assess the emotional intelligence of a potential employee. It is an application that is often used by workplace psychologists.
The person taking the assessment is scored into one of five composite scores, and there are also 15 subscales that can further classify the emotional intelligence or EQ of the candidate. Some of the things this test measures are problem-solving skills and emotional expression.
It was designed to help recruiters be more nuanced in their decision-making process when sorting through there queue of candidates.
This assessment is targeted toward a few specific industries including mental health professionals, school psychologists, law enforcement positions, and leadership talent.
The Caliper Profile assessment test
Companies have been using the Caliper Profile assessment test for over 50 years, and it has been proven to help assess the work personality of potential employees. The assessment helps a recruiter identify 25 different traits that all relate in some way to job performance.
It can either be taken online or in the HR office on paper. The creators of the test state that it provides objective information and can give insight into the strengths, limitation, potential, and motivations of the potential employees.
According to the Caliper website, there have been over 4 million people assessed so far, and more than 50 thousand different companies have utilized the test. It has been translated into 32 different languages, and it claims that there is a low ability for it to be faked.
The Gallup Profile
Quite similar to the Caliper Profile, the Gallup assessment is sometimes preferred by companies due to the fact that it tends to focus on the strengths of the candidate rather than the negative factors.
What this means is that this assessment is likely to show you the places that the candidate is likely to succeed. However, it won’t do as good a job of telling you where they may fail.
Basically, the assessment looks at ten different “builder talents” and three “builder roles.” The talents include:
- Confidence
- Delegator
- Determination
- Disruptor
- Independence
- Knowledge
- Profitability
- Relationship
- Risk
- Selling
The three roles include:
- Rainmaker
- Conductor
- Expert
Recruiters are advised to look at how the talent and the roles intersect with their available position and the needs of their company.
The SHL occupational personality questionnaire
This assessment has been in use for over 30 years, and it was created to help employers better understand the behaviors in their employees or potential employees that will have a direct impact on their job performance.
SHL actually has three different assessment types that they can supply. Recruiters can choose from a behavioral assessment, a personality test, and an ability assessment. This combination of tools should allow recruiters to build a solid portfolio for each of the roles they are trying to fill.
There are several industries that are currently using the SHL Occupational personality questionnaire. These include finance, insurance, retail, hospitality, healthcare, transportation, technology, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
The company also offers a few pre-packed assessments to suit particular roles like IT, collections, administration, and call centers. Since these have questions that are skewed for the particular role, they may offer a more valuable set of metrics than a more generic assessment.
At the end of the day
All of these assessments use psychometric data and advanced algorithms to help you better understand the work personality of your candidates. You will find that trying to harness analytics in recruitment can lead to better hiring decisions while allowing you to more strongly align your team members based on personality data.
Having these objective measures can go a long way towards helping you hire the best fit for your company. When the work personalities of your teammates match, your entire company will thrive. Plus, you will be better able to hold on to those employees that you worked so hard to find.
