Recruitment: What Do Personality Tests Reveal?

Over the past decade, finding candidates has become increasingly difficult. Recruiting new talent is now a major challenge, and the pressure to hire quickly can be overwhelming. However, rushing the process isn’t a good idea. Quick decisions can lead to having to start the hiring process all over again, which means more time, costs, and effort spent on onboarding.

How to Avoid Recruitment Mistakes and Ensure a Candidate is the Right Fit for Your Organisation

To minimise the risk of errors, the recruitment process should consist of multiple stages. Relying solely on intuition or gut feeling is not enough; decisions must be based on evidence. Therefore, it’s recommended to involve not only HR professionals and the hiring manager but also colleagues in the selection process, allowing more people to assess potential team members. Additionally, it’s important to go beyond interviews and incorporate tasks and assessments. This allows for a deeper understanding of the candidate and allows them to evaluate whether the company and the position are truly what they are seeking.

Personality Tests in the Recruitment Process

Let’s focus on personality tests developed by our UNLOCK Tests team.

• Personality tests give you a detailed picture of a candidate’s personality, helping you see if they’re a good fit not just for the job, but for your team and company culture too. They can reveal things you might not pick up in an interview.
• Think about it: people can prepare for interviews, so they might hide or downplay certain traits to make a good impression.

UNLOCK Personality looks at 6 personality factors, 24 traits, and 8 team roles, giving you a thorough understanding of your candidate. It even checks if they’re being honest when answering the questions, so you know you’re getting real answers.

There’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” personality traits, it’s all about finding the right fit. For instance, an introvert might struggle to lead a big presentation, but an extrovert would love it. On the flip side, an extrovert might find it tough to spend a week alone planning an event, while an introvert would handle it with ease. This is just one example.  How often do people end up in roles that don’t play to their strengths? It happens a lot, and it hurts everyone: the employee, the team, and the company. By looking at the candidate’s personality profile, you’ll get to know them better and be able to tell if they’re really suited for the role you’re trying to fill.

How to Effectively Use Personality Tests?

1. Define and Identify Desired Traits and Roles: Clearly outline the traits and roles you are looking for. What should your future team members be like? For example, if you need an accountant, you might expect higher levels of perfectionism and diligence. For a sales manager, higher extroversion might be desirable. If you are looking for a leader, you will need someone ambitious, with high self-control, social courage, and low tension. UNLOCK Personality provides descriptions of all traits and team roles, helping you identify the most important criteria for your needs.

2. Evaluate Current Team Members: Assess not only the position but also test existing team members to identify the traits of your most successful employees in specific roles. This helps you refine the profile of your ideal candidate.

3. Identify Missing Traits or Roles in Your Team: Consider the traits or team roles your team lacks. Maybe you need an idea generator or someone who can unite the team. By analysing your team’s profile, you can pinpoint exactly what you need.

Use personality tests as one of your recruitment tools

The personality test report serves as a great starting point for discussion – you can talk about the results with candidates, clarify their own thoughts on certain scores, and how they would explain them. For instance, if a candidate has a high tension score, and the job involves stressful situations, how do they view these results and how do they think they would handle challenging situations?

Recruitment is a two-way street, and open discussions allow both the organisation and the candidate to assess whether the offered position is a good fit.

Don’t rely solely on interviews; get to know your candidates from different angles for the best results.

Don’t want to miss out on the latest news?

Subscribe to our newsletter and be the first to receive information about our new Blog articles, research and insights.

Planning Personality assessment for your organisation? Get in touch and try our demo version for free.