Personality Assessments a Smarter Way to Hire and Nurture Employees

A recent report – Towards a Payroll Reporting in India, states that India is on track to creating 5.5 million formal sector jobs this financial year. This means for organisations looking to fill these jobs, finding the right fit candidate is a crucial imperative. Why? The cost of a single bad hire adds up quickly – from negatively impacting productivity and company culture to hindering client relationships. In fact, according to a Career Builder Survey, companies can lose an average of $14,900 on every bad hire. So, what can companies do to hire a candidate who not only has the right skill set but is also a great cultural fit?

One way to identify such candidates is to administer a personality assessment test. Personality assessments help organisations predict positive interactions between people and correlate it to job success. For instance, Xerox screens its candidates for compassion to understand if they have the necessary skills to excel at customer service.

Here are three ways organisations can leverage personality assessments to improve hiring and employee development decisions:

Hire and nurture best-fit candidates

Companies such as BNY Mellon and Johnson &Johnson leverage 150 personality questions and cognitive ability tests, to identify the right person for a certain role. Lesson to learn: when hiring talent, measure candidate fit based on the competencies related to success in the role. Personality assessments are a great way to discover people’s hidden traits, their team building capabilities, communication skills, as well as identify areas for improvement. For instance, if you think you have a team member who can engage and contribute at a higher level, a personality test provides the necessary insights into the employee’s personality to match him or her to the right roles and projects. The result: enhanced employee engagement and improved productivity.

Discover employee sustainability

While on-boarding a new hire, it is important to ensure that the candidate will thrive in the position. An interview alone cannot provide an adequate assessment of the employee’s cultural and job fit. Personality assessments help gauge applicants’ emotional intensity, intuition, recognition, motivation, sensitivity, assertiveness, trust, and exaggeration. The assessment also helps candidates find careers that make the most sense through a process of self-discovery. Leading companies such as Procter & Gamble and Hewlett Packard leverage personality assessments to pair business culture with employee personality traits.

Enhance employee engagement

Personality tests are fundamental to better understanding employee’s strength and weaknesses. Companies such as Success Labs and Showit leverage Myers-Briggs assessment to enhance employee interactions. How does this help? It ensures that co-workers understand and support each other’s strengths, increasing employee engagement and retention. The end result is an extremely engaged workforce and a highly effective and productive workplace.

With every company promoting its own unique culture, personality assessments help uncover talents and preferences that improve hiring decisions, and drive on the job engagement and growth. But to realize its true value, a personality assessment test must be relevant to the company’s goals and administered correctly. A testing and assessment services leader can help organisations make the most of their personality assessment efforts by designing the assessment to measure specific traits and helping them accurately interpret the results