Bridging the Skills Gap with Personality Tests
When it comes to hiring, organisations face many challenges, such as identifying the right skills and potential among applicants, which can be especially difficult when evaluating early career candidates with limited work experience.
- Technical skills alone do not accurately predict job success or organisational suitability.
- Personality tests can be used to build a more complete and nuanced view of an individual’s potential by assessing qualities such as culture fit and digital readiness.
- Assessment tools offer an easy and scientifically sound way to identify unsuitable candidates, so you can focus your recruitment efforts on finding and hiring the right talent.
While technical skills are in demand and remain vital to success in most roles, today’s collaborative and collegiate workplaces mean soft skills, including self-motivation and communication, are increasingly important. This means, when deciding who has more potential to succeed in a role, talent managers need to consider candidates’ personalities and behaviour profiles as well as their technical capabilities.
Our Guide to Making Better People Decisions with Talent Assessment reveals that 51% of APAC organisations prefer candidates who can communicate with impact, and the second most sought-after competency is initiative taking.
To ensure their decisions are based on an accurate, holistic understanding of candidates, talent managers can use tests that measure behavioural qualities and learn more about an individual’s traits, motivations and working style. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) indicates that the use of personality assessments has grown to over 20% in recent years1.
The Limitations of Technical Skills Assessments
Evaluating candidates on their technical skills alone does not guarantee success, and ensuring individuals and teams feature the right mix of personalities and soft skills should be a key consideration when hiring early career candidates. After all, technical skills can often be taught more easily than intrinsic personality traits or soft skills.
The Role of Personality Tests
Personality tests offer a scientific, objective approach to evaluating candidates' behavioural attributes, strengths and weaknesses. By assessing personality traits, organisations can learn how candidates are likely to approach and perform in various environments and roles.
Personality tests can be applied to:
- Identifying Cultural Fit
44% reported that feeling aligned with the company culture was their biggest driver of belonging at work
- Predicting Job Performance
Using personality tests can also lead to more accurate predictions about a candidate’s chance of success in a specific role. According to a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Research in Personality, there is a significant correlation between personality traits and job performance across various occupations and industries.
- Assessing Digital Readiness
Personality tests can also help to identify candidates most likely to thrive in a technology driven environment. A research paper showed that individuals exhibiting specific personality traits, such as a high emotional intelligence are more likely to possess digital entrepreneurial behaviour.
How to Choose the Right Tool
It is important to choose the right personality tool for your organisation and candidates and the most effective tools offer multiple features.
First, choose a tool that can generate a report with different levels of detail and scope to address different stakeholder and candidate needs. For instance, a recruiter or hiring manager typically needs profile scores to differentiate between strong or weak candidates. However, to avoid causing unnecessary anxiety, candidates should not receive these scores when receiving feedback about their assessment.
Sample of a report provided to the candidate
Personality tools such as ADEPT-15 are convenient and easy to use from almost any device and generate reports within seconds to help minimise time-to-hire.
Compared to other self-report assessment solutions, technology-based personality tools that operate on scientific principles can help to reduce fraud risk and minimise inaccuracies – such as when individuals exaggerate their desirable characteristics and deny having undesirable ones. For example, when asked, “How much do you agree with the statement ‘I make friends easily”? individuals tend to agree to a significant extent, regardless of their genuine beliefs about themselves. To reduce the impact of these falsely reported positive personality attributes, ADEPT-15 offers questions that provide equally socially desirable answer options. For example, individuals are asked to choose between “I am always on time for appointments” and “I make friends easily”. This delivers a more authentic assessment of the candidate’s personality by mitigating the risk of bias.
1 What Do Personality Tests Really Reveal? (shrm.org)
2 Understanding The Importance of Corporate Culture After the Great Resignation (forbes.com)
