• 3 min. read

3 Things You Must Know about Personality Assessment Software

Hiring the best is the most important task and personality assessment can help recruiters to early identify who the most fitted candidates are.

Written by Daniela Costa

Using a personality assessment software can be a game changer when it comes to your company’s recruitment strategy. After all, what do companies look to improve in their recruitment process? Recruiters constantly search for ways to reduce the time to fill a position and minimise the cost per hire due to budget constraints. But, as Steve Jobs has said, hiring the best is the most important task. Personality assessment is a great tool that can help recruiters to achieve these major goals, by allowing them to identify early in the recruitment process who the most fitted candidates are.

Next, we list the main reasons why you should use a personality assessment tool.

3 things you must know about personality assessment software

1. It provides an objective, reliable and easy way of assessing candidates

Pre-employment assessments are one of the most objective ways of predicting job performance and company fit. It consists in the use of tests and questionnaires to assess candidates in terms of a wide range of aspects such as cognitive ability, critical thinking skills, personality, preferences and motivation, among many others. And they’re especially designed to help companies hire more effectively given that they’re built upon several years of experience in research in the context of how personality can predict job performance.

Isn’t it valuable to get deep insight regarding how your candidates will react and behave in a work setting? You can't get this kind of insight out of a candidate’s CV and if you ask about it on an interview candidate's most likely won’t tell the truth. But well-designed and scientifically validated tests are a reliable and objective way of assessing candidates.

And because they provide concrete results that can be standardised across all candidates, recruiters can use test results to make better informed and more defensible hiring decisions. This explains why both large and small companies are increasingly using pre-employment assessments. The publisher of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test states that 89 of the Fortune 100 companies use their personality test to screen candidates and predict future success.

2. It is applicable to a wide range of job categories

Research shows that well developed pre-employment assessment can successfully predict employee performance across the wide range of job categories. What you are looking for in a candidate may vary depending on the department or industry you are hiring for. For hiring senior level executives you’ll probably want to assess cognitive ability and overall personality traits. If you’re hiring a waiter maybe you’ll be more interested in personality traits like sociability, timeliness, and conscientiousness.

However, even though you may use different types of tests, ideally, they should be normative – so that candidates’ scores can be quickly compared; reliable and valid – to be a proven predictor of job performance, tests must be scientifically validated and candidates have to score similar results if they re-take the test; hard to game – the answers to the tests can’t be available online and the test must be an accurate assessment of actual skills and behavioural traits; candid – the tests can’t have “leading” questions and have to be designed in such a way that candidates can be screened for overall honesty.

3. It can improve candidate selection right from the start of the recruitment process

Using a personality assessment tool to screen candidates early on significantly improves your selection process. Although the personality assessment mustn’t be the only evaluation element of the recruitment process, it is an important one that should be combined with CV analysis and, later on, with the in-person interview. However, by applying it at the beginning of the process, and not at the end, it helps to screen out candidates that are not a good fit at all. This makes it easier for recruiters to focus only on the most promising profiles throughout the selection process and to identify and hire the best talent at the end.

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Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn and Facebook pages for further information.

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