• 4 min. read

The Beginner's Guide to Personality Assessment Software

Personality assessment improves the way you evaluate and select candidates, allowing you to make better, data-driven hiring decisions.

Written by Daniela Costa

Are you looking to upgrade your recruitment’s efficiency? Gut guessing is not working for your HR team anymore? Well, then you should consider including a personality assessment software in your company’s tool kit.

This powerful tool totally changes the way you assess and select the candidates on your talent pool and allows you to make better hiring decisions, supported with proven science and data.

And it does so because by using assessments that were designed and vetted by industry leading I/O psychologists, your company is able to both identify exceptional candidates that otherwise would go unnoticed through the traditional screening methods and avoid the risk of poor candidates making it to the final stage of the recruitment process.

Pre-employment assessments are one of the most objective ways of predicting job performance and company fit. They consist 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.

Although there are different types of scientifically proven pre-employment assessments, we at skeeled use a Personality Assessment called PCI (Personality Characteristics Inventory) to measure the Big Five dimensions of the candidates’ personality in a work behavioural context.

So, before guiding you through the implementation of the personality assessment software in your recruitment process, let’s first discuss personality and job performance prediction.

Using Personality Assessment to Predict Candidates’ Job Performance

Personality is considered to be one of the most important future job performance predictors. In a work setting, personality is determinant in the way individuals interact with one another and that affects the daily outcome of any organisation. If a team doesn’t work well together that will ultimately affect the organisational productivity.

Measuring workplace personality traits and occupational scores that are predictive of job performance helps you and your company to quickly assess if a candidate is suitable for a job position or not, across a wide range of job categories.

Furthermore, the personality assessment we use at skeeled, the PCI, is a normative test. It yields an estimation of the position of the test-taker regarding the general population, which allows you not only to assess the result of an individual, but also to make direct comparison between candidates in the talent pool and assess which one will be the best fit for your company.

Ultimately, while individual competencies represented on a CV can tell us what kind of tasks or responsibilities one can perform on the job, personality assessment can portrait the way a person will do it.

There is valuable candidate information that you cannot get out of a CV and that is determinant for you to be able to make the best choices. Think about how you can know if a candidate will experience extreme stress when facing an adverse situation or keep his head up and overcome it with ease. And how can you know if that same candidate will do the job in a more conscientious manner or in a more careless way. The fact is, personality has major impact on individual behavioural tendencies and in order to fully evaluate if a candidate will fit the job profile, you should have this type of assessment into consideration when making a hiring decision.

It is especially designed to help organisations hire more effectively as it is built upon several years of experience in research in the context of how personality can predict job performance.

This is an ideal pre-employment assessment because it allows to quickly identify if a candidate is suitable for a position, given that it covers nearly all potential workplace personality traits a person has and relates them with potential job performance.

Implementing a Personality Assessment Software in your Recruitment Process

Integrating technology in the recruitment process, especially for matching and screening purposes, is crucial to improve the way companies find, hire, and manage talent.

And thankfully, HR tech recent developments has brought to the market more cost-wise accessible solutions. Hence, the number of companies that use new advanced screening and assessment methods keeps increasing.

The most important benefits of providing the personality assessment on a digital platform are: saving both the recruiter and the candidate a lot of time and making it much easier for recruiters to analyse and compare the results.

By having an integrated personality assessment tool, you can allow your candidates to do the assessment online, when and where they see best fit, which also favours your company in terms of candidate experience.

So, besides choosing the right tool for your company, it’s of the utmost importance that you customise your recruitment workflow to properly fit the personality assessment.

What I mean is that this is not something you should just add up to the bottom of your recruitment process list. You must do precisely the opposite. Bear with me. How will the personality assessment better assist you? In the final stage of the recruitment process, when you’ve already shortlisted your candidates based on CV only, and you have to make a decision? Or at the beginning of the recruitment cycle, when you must go dive into a huge pool of candidates and miraculously find the best talents, even those that hide behind a regular standard CV?

The initial screening of applicants can greatly benefit from the data-driven personality assessment insights. So, your biggest challenges are to make sure you implement it in the right stage of your recruitment cycle and that you use a personality assessment software that adapts itself seamlessly to your hiring process, like skeeled, to ensure that you are able to identify and hire the best talent.

second_-personality-image

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.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!

Your team here at skeeled

Subscribe to get the latest insights on recruitment and talent acquisition delivered right to your inbox.