Question

Personality Traits

You are about to go on a job interview. Your employer requires you to take a personality trait type test during the first phase of the hiring process. Discuss the pros and cons of why an employer may want to use this type of assessment tool and how you would feel as a potential applicant at this company.

Answer 1

1) Ans)

The right hiring decisions can truly define a company. In an effort to build top-quality workforces, human resource departments are increasingly turning to advanced tools such as personality tests to aid them in their hiring decisions. .

Personality tests are assessments that provide insight into important but intangible information about candidates, such as their personality, values and work preferences. Armed with this information, human resource managers are able to gain insight into how well a candidate might fare in any given job. The pros and cons of personality testing are significant, and companies must weigh them carefully before deciding on their use.

Pros of Personality Testing:

Personality testing can certainly provide substantial benefits to hiring managers. As a concept, they have been praised for several reasons:

Knowing the unique information personality tests provide can help hiring managers assess a candidate’s fit into company culture.

Personality tests allow hiring managers to better understand how to keep individual employees engaged and motivated at work.

Well-designed, standardized assessments allow an organization to improve its legal defensibility by providing a fairer method of candidate comparison.

Personality tests can reduce the chance of putting the wrong person in the wrong role (a mistake that can be costly).

Strengthening the interview: A good personality assessment can help hiring managers to know which soft skills and behavioral interview questions they should pay attention to during the interview.

Gaining a deeper insight into candidates: Employees and job candidates have a broad range of skills, abilities, and work styles. These differences are not always apparent on a resume or during an interview, so personality assessments can give you another tool for understanding what the candidate has to offer and how they will fit into your work culture.

Development and recognition tools: Personality assessments help you to understand the values, motives, and preferences of employees and will help you know what they need from you as an employer to stay engaged.

Team building: Employees are increasingly working in a team environment. When building and managing teams, understanding the personalities of team members is critical for success. which focuses on individual strengths and advises on how to pairs archetypes together that will produce the best results.

Improving the culture: Personality tests can be used to enhance your organization’s culture by understanding each employee’s communication styles, leadership styles, learning styles, and level of introversion or extroversion.

Cons of Personality Testing:

For all their positive qualities, personality tests also have drawbacks. Criticisms include:

Time. Personality tests can be time-consuming, which may lead to job candidate frustration or even loss to other companies.

Money. Personality tests can be costly to administer. Costs can range between $100 to $5,000 per candidate,
While useful for gaining behavioral insight, personality tests are not always the best indicators of how successful an individual will be in a job. This is particularly true with certain tests such as the Four Quadrant (4-Q) test and Myers-Briggs assessment. Although these tests have not been validated as strong measures of job performance, they remain popular among employers.

Reliability. Candidates often answer personality tests by choosing answers they believe employers want to hear. This can make test results difficult to interpret or even invalid.

For companies that want to assess candidates more substantially but conclude that personality testing is wrong for their needs, alternative testing methods are available.

Rules and regulations: The personality testing market isn’t subject to government regulation. Technically, anyone can design and administer tests. To increase the probability of accurate interpretations, and to avoid any unintentional discrimination, it is important that you find a fair and consistent test, and you use only trained professionals to administer and evaluate the assessments.

They aren’t the final answer: Although personality assessments can help to provide a deeper insight into a candidate’s motives, values, and work styles, they do not give the final verdict on which candidate is the right one for the job. Personality assessments are not prediction tools. They simply provide you with indicators for success.

Overall, the right personality fit is critical for good performance. However, it is important to keep in mind that personality assessments are not a stand-alone tool. They should be used only in conjunction with other employee screening techniques such as behavioral interviews and references to reflect all of an applicant’s characteristics. Some tests are better predictors than others, so it is important to do your research. All tests should be job-related, consistent with business necessity, and compliant with any federal and state regulations pertaining to pre-employment testing.