Personality Assessments Help Hiring and Employee Development

There are 2 scenarios that assessments are normally used:

A good manager believes “Where there is smoke, there is fire” and if the assessment comes back with more than TWO points of contention, they may think they are better off passing on you and moving on to the next candidate.  They don’t wanna gamble with their new hires.

1. As a hiring tool in the hiring process.
2. As an employee development tool for revenue managers.

So what happens when they take the test and it shows they don’t like to communicate with people and are introverted?

The manager and the team member work together to assemble a plan that will develop or supplement the areas they got to be successful.  If they are poor public speakers, maybe Toastmasters is a worthy idea for Them.  If they have no clue what a day in the life of a sales rep is like, what about scheduled ride-along days in the field?

What happens next?  Are they doomed to stay in that role forever?  No.

Personality assessments work similarly in terms of employee development.  As a manager, sometimes you have a really worthwhile employee who wants to move to a different role. Maybe they’re in a technical staff job and they would like to transition to a line job selling. You like the employee’s values and work ethic and you want to help ‘em advance in their career, but you don’t wanna set Them up for failure by putting ‘em in a job that doesn’t match their skill set.

People who vociferously disagree with their results are almost always a personnel issue waiting to happen. They think they have all the skills needed for their job and they’re great. The truth is that’s they don’t have the needed skills and probably won’t change.

A wonderful manager will handle it correctly by sitting down with the team member and having a conversation about the assessment and try and understand how the team member perceives and interprets the results.

If the assessment and the review is done right, both parties leave with a better understanding of the team member and where they want to go in the organization and what skills they will need to be successful in a new role.

Personality Assessments such as  Caliper, Disc, Gallup, HBDI and FiroB are popular tools that yield useful, consistent information for clinical sales managers.

An assessment that’s used in the beginning is usually used to screen out people that wouldn’t fit in the position. When I say fit, maybe it is a very technical scientific position and the candidate didn’t have a science degree. The employer may be using an assessment that focuses on abstract reasoning because that is seen as a precious measure of intelligence and they are trying to gauge if the candidate will be able to grasp their new technology quickly. If it is an accounting job, maybe the employer is focused more on the candidate’s ability to work by themselves with no direction.

The conversation should be warm and focused on the individual. As you go through the assessment with Them and ask their feedback, you will start to get a picture of how that team member sees his or her self. When you start reviewing some of the needed skill sets for the new job and how their results compare to that, often the team member will see that where they wanna go doesn’t utilize their strengths and it would be a really difficult transition.

Your thoughts?  Comments?  Put them in the comment section or e-mail me at:  kraig@phcconsulting.com

Kraig McKee

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It’s much less likely to keep you from getting the job if you are taking the assessment as a final step to receiving an offer—unless your assessment comes back with anti-social behavior patterns, the manager will probably move forward.

Article courtesy of  Peggy McKee - Owner / Senior Recruiter at the nationally
recognized clinical and pharma sales recruiting team of PHC Consulting.
© Copyright 2008 PHC Consulting | All rights reserved

In the hiring process, you normally take an assessment at the very beginning of the interview process or towards the end.

Personality Assessments Help Hiring and Employee Development