Personality Assessments: Why Behavior at Work Matters

The Right Behaviors For Job Success

There is a saying that goes: “We hire for skills, we fire for personality.” However, what if we could reliably hire for personality at the start? And what if we could leverage personality in identifying and developing high-potential candidates in an existing workforce?

Your people are the most important asset to your business. They are key to maintaining momentum and taking your company forward into the future. With that said, how much do you truly know about the people on your team? Probably not much.

Your workforce is likely to be made up of a variety of people, each with their own goals, priorities and unique characteristics. Getting to know your people puts you ahead, and personality assessments allow you to do just that.

Employers have relied on personality assessments for decades in the hiring process. In 1919, the US Army began using them to screen applicants. However, they have never been as effective as they are today. The latest generation of workplace behavior tests use technology and industrial-organizational psychology to assess candidates’ motivations, values and personal characteristics, and evaluate their odds of success in a specific role.

It should be noted that not all assessments are the same. There are tests on the market that simply do not meet scientific standards. Because of these tests and their claim of being able to categorize people into personality types, many employers have written off the value of personality assessments.

However, when they are grounded in science and fact, measuring personality can be an extremely valuable part of human resource strategy and planning.

When given the right tools, employers can reliably predict who will be successful in a role based on their motivations, values and behavioral factors. Here is how.

The Power of the Right Person-Job-Fit

The lifespan of expertise in the workplace is diminishing, making personality increasingly important to workplace success. For the average employee, the skills acquired on the job have a half-life of about five years. This means that modern workers and employers cannot know for sure what technical skills they will need in the future.

Personality traits and behaviors increasingly matter for determining whether an employee will be able to keep pace with change and succeed in their role or fall behind. Understanding who has the interest, motivation and behaviors to learn and be flexible and curious can help employees and employers map related jobs and lateral career paths. This enables companies as well as employers to grow and meet future needs.

Personality is conceptually distinct from, and should be largely unrelated to, cognitive ability. Cognitive ability has long been praised as an essential predictor of a person's job performance. Numerous employers have made significant decisions based on this belief. We would not argue that cognitive ability is not important, just that it is incomplete. The ability to measure other factors — such as personality — adds another layer of information.

Behavioral assessments, coupled with cognitive ability, help to identify candidates who are the best fit for now and in the future. This allows for better hiring, placement, and promotion decisions.

Knowing what success looks like

If you want to make the best use of personality assessments, you must know what you are looking for. What core values and beliefs does your organization want to cultivate? It is time to get your old competency models dusted off and give them a behavioral blueprint. Translating your organization's core values into behaviors makes it easier to measure how well your employees are embodying those values. It also gives employees a clear understanding of the types of behaviors you expect from them. Embracing an organization’s core values is difficult to do in the abstract, but it becomes much easier when supplemented by concrete behavioral examples.

Good Leadership Behavior

The behaviors that make someone a good leader can be measured through talent assessments. By setting up a 'success profile' - a description of the behaviors that a successful job incumbent shows - you can begin recognizing those people who will be good at the job and successful in your organization.

Showcasing Desirable Behaviors Pre-Hire

Employee buy-in is important too. You have to be honest with applicants about what the day-to-day duties and behaviors entail. You can use a job preview with situational judgment to provide a candidate insight into what their work day at your organization will be like. This is a great way of letting applicants decide for themselves whether they want to behave in ways that align with the role. Beginning an employee relationship with integrity increases its value — both to the employee and your organization.

How to Recognize a Good Assessment

There are a lot of behavioral assessments on the market, ranging from magazine pop quizzes to hours-long face-to-face assessments with several observers. So how do you differentiate the good from the bad from the ugly?

Reliable And Valid

Any assessment provider should be able to answer two main questions:

How reliable is the assessment?

Reliability (also called accuracy) is the extent to which a psychometric tool measures the same aspect again and again, every time it is used. Are the results dependable?

How valid is the assessment?

Validity is concerned with whether the test measures what it is designed to measure.

Both reliability and validity are measured on a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 being a utopian value of perfect reliability or validity. A good diagnostic instrument should have a value of at least 0.3 – the higher the better.

As Short as Possible, as Long as Necessary

Another recent advancement in personality assessments comes from leveraging technology to make assessments less repetitive, more personalized and more accurate. People often get frustrated with standard, flat-form personality assessments because their methodology relies on asking the same question many times. This can lead to a less-than-stellar experience and result in a boring process that frustrates candidates. However, the algorithms used in adaptive testing result in a more dynamic and variable experience for candidates. Candidate experience is improved as a result.

Not all behaviors are relevant to all jobs. Knowing what is really important allows an assessment to be tailored to assess the relevant behaviors. Applicants understand and accept the need to create effective assessments with high job relevance.

Sleek User Experience

Behavioral assessments that have been designed specifically for use on mobile devices allow applicants the flexibility and autonomy to complete the assessment at their convenience, on the platform of their choosing.
Ideally candidates also get a ‘takeaway’ as a reward for completing the assessment. The results of the assessment, presented in easily understandable language as an interactive report, go a long way toward securing applicants’ acceptance of the assessment. They also create a positive image of the hiring organization.

How Technology Helps Us Accurately and Reliably Assess Behavior

The ability to customize personality assessments to the traits most associated with job success allows for shorter, more responsive assessments that improve the candidate experience. In the past, a 45-minute personality questionnaire may have been needed to get a valid score. Today, the assessment can take as little as 25 to 30 minutes to produce equivalent valid results.

Psychometric techniques to make accurate predictions about workplace behavior and avoid socially desirable responses and other attempts to 'trick' the test.

These assessments help employers overcome a wide range of challenges in the human capital area, this including identifying, promoting, and developing key performers.

Various types of modern personality assessment tools can help you do this by employing multidimensional forced-choice assessments. Here, test takers must choose between two or more options or weight the described behaviors that most likely match the self-description.

This approach, using AI-powered assessment models, allows employers to provide reliable and valid personality assessments based on the behaviors that are required for a specific job, in a more efficient and effective way.

Counteracting Prejudices

Advanced assessment solutions using algorithms are powering the transformation needed to drive a change in talent selection and more diverse recruitment. Companies can now consider a much larger pool of candidates and make more objective decisions by using AI to match candidate personality profiles and competencies with job descriptions and organizational requirements. Since personality does not typically have naturally-occurring inherent subgroup differences, using personality assessments as part of a candidate selection process can achieve greater diversity.

Computerized, adaptive personality assessments can help companies to recruit more diverse talent and build better teams. These assessments can provide the objectivity needed to identify candidates who will fit well into the company culture and contribute to a more diverse workforce. This helps hiring managers to rely on data for decision making rather than on gut feelings or intuition.

Conclusion

Technology has changed how we think and assess personality over the past two decades, but employers that want to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to cutting-edge personality assessments should consider how technology can influence our perception of personality, workplace dynamics, and testing in the next decade and beyond.

The skills shortage is ongoing, and demographics and workplace culture continue to change. This will result in employers needing to provide a top-notch candidate experience. Technology will advance to create a people-centered experience that candidates can undertake when and where they want. As a result, the evaluation process becomes more individual and faster.

Building a responsive, agile 21st century workforce is not just about the technical skills of the people you hire in the short term. It is also about creating a strong, unique workplace culture that puts people at its center. Personality is at the core of that.
Companies face challenges in making the transition to a more modern approach to talent assessment. However, those who embrace the shift will be better positioned to create a workforce that can thrive in the digital age.

Aon | Assessment Solutions

Aon's assessment solutions provides clients with powerful tools and insights to help them make better talent decisions at every stage of the employee lifecycle. This includes pre-hire assessments, identifying future leaders, screening for digital skills and agility, and AI-enabled solutions.