What matters more to you when hiring: the applicants’ personality or the skills in their CVs? A study revealed that 78% of professionals from various industries agreed that personality is the most crucial factor when hiring. These employers cited the initial skillset as the least important factor. Many employers want to find people who will mesh well with their values and cultures.
Why Should You Recruit for Personality?
According to Leadership IQ’s study that involved about 20,000 companies, 46% of new employees quit their jobs or fail within one and a half years. Also, a whopping 89% of those failures were due to attitudinal reasons. You can imagine the cost these companies incurred due to high employee turnover. So, assessing your applicants’ personality rewards you with the following benefits:
1. Boost Employee Engagement: If a person’s preferences and interests fit a job, they’ll keep them engaged over a long period in the workplace. As an employer, you’ll want to know your potential employee’s engagement level in the job. People who enjoy doing their tasks are more likely to derive satisfaction from their jobs. Consequently, they’ll gladly welcome opportunities for growth and development in their careers. As such, expect improved on-the-job performance, which will boost the overall success of your business.
Your business needs people that will freely share ideas and forge robust cooperation. However, it’s nearly impossible to determine if a potential employee can interact positively with your customers and other employees before hiring them. That’s where an employee personality assessment becomes useful. You can determine an applicants’ social skills with a quick personality test.
2. Increase Employee Success and Job Performance: Pre-employment personality assessments can give you powerful insights into a candidate’s future success at the workplace. If you’re looking for employees that will post stellar performance in your business, the assessments will help you identify desirable personality traits.
These traits include professionalism, high energy, confidence, self-monitoring, empathy, etc. You can rest assured you’ll reduce your employee turnover by recruiting for traits such as these. Your workforce will tend to stay positive in their jobs and improve performance.
3. Reduce the Cost of Bad Hires: You win some and lose some, but it’s expensive to hire badly. So, strive to hire more people with the right personality. While a typical profit-and-loss spreadsheet will never reveal bad hires, evidence shows that low employee retention is among the factors that hurt corporate profitability. According to research, a company can incur 50% to 400% of an employee’s annual salary if that employee leaves.
What Are Some of the Crucial Personality Traits to Look for in a Candidate?
When arming yourself with personality tests for your applicants, be sure you identify all the ideal traits that fit the target positions. Here are the most common qualities to test:
- Professionalism: This trait includes a person’s attitude, behavior, and conduct in a business or work environment. You want people who conduct their jobs in a way that preserves and even boosts your company’s image.
- High energy: An employee with high motivation will work their tail off to bring maximum value to your business. They’re usually highly engaged, proactive, energized, driven, focused, and coachable.
- Confidence: Having technical skills is one thing, but demonstrating confidence in your skills to solve an issue is another thing. Does your candidate believe in themselves and their ability to serve clients, interact with other employees, and push your business forward?
- Self-monitoring: Don’t hire a person that will laze around and scamper to their duties when they see you or their superior. Go for those who value the company’s time, know how to use their skills for particular tasks, and self-monitor their improvement. Such breeds don’t need high levels of supervision.
- Team-player: While one person can move quickly, your company requires team players if you’re looking to grow. Employees who easily collaborate among themselves will brainstorm on ideas, solve problems together, and support each other for common goals.
- Empathy: A highly empathetic personality strives to cultivate curiosity about strangers, discover commonalities, listen well, and try to understand another person’s situation. They also have ambitious imaginations. Hire empathetic people to wow your clients, surrounding community, fellow employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
How Personality Assessments Can Help Pin-Point the Right Candidates
Employee personality tests aim to determine attitudinal and other traits. Most modern tests, like Sprockets’, employ a combination of psychology and technology to identify red flags. Forward-thinking companies understand the importance of hiring for personality and embrace these psychology-backed assessments. They’ve realized that relying on gut feelings and CVs alone can only take them so far.
The icing on the cake is that you can get the testing done within just a few minutes using a desktop or mobile device. You can then use the results to assess how applicants will fit with your business culture. With these personality assessment tests, you’ll get all sorts of relevant information concerning your applicants, like their:
- Level of emotional intelligence
- Work ethic
- Reliability
- Score in terms of the big five personality dimensions: extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness
Would you like to customize the tests to meet your specific wants and needs? These psychology assessments can handle that too.
Hire the Right Fit With Sprockets!
There’s more to hiring the perfect candidate than experience and skills. Hiring someone with the right personality is crucial to the company’s success. While skills can be taught, having the right attitude, passion, and eagerness for a field cannot. Focusing on the candidate’s personality is vital to ensure a healthy work culture and employee engagement amongst team members. The wrong personality and attitude issues can impair workplace morale, draining your energy, resources, and time. Eventually, negative traits can drive away your hard-earned customers and top performers.
Do you find it hard hiring the right fit for your business work culture? At Sprockets, pinpointing the perfect match is our business. Request a demo now and see how we can bring value to your business.