How Personality Can Identify the Right Candidate

As talent increasingly becomes a competitive advantage for companies, many hiring managers, HR Professionals, and Talent Acquisition experts find themselves tasked with pulling in the best talent with less time, smaller budgets, and more competition. In fact, 89% of companies are dealing with talent shortages.

As they do, an emphasis on soft skills has taken the front seat, and smart hiring professionals are starting to realize that measuring for personality fit is becoming more critical in predicting job success than just experience alone.

Hiring for Soft Skills

The statistics speak for themselves. According to a 2014 survey, 78% of professionals identified personality as the most desirable quality in a worker. Many executives cited skillset as the least important factor in hiring an employee. Below are some other reasons to focus on soft skills, especially during a talent shortage:

• 97% of employees and executives believe the lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project.
• Almost half of an employee’s success in the first 18 months on the job can be attributed to how the employee fits in with others in the organization, while the rest of their success depends on whether they can do the job.
• Employees who are more closely aligned with their company and/or team saw a number of improvements in their work:
  • Greater job satisfaction
  • More likely to remain with their organization
  • More committed to their work/role
  • Higher job performance

• According to the Society of Human Resource Management, hiring someone who is a poor cultural fit can cost businesses anywhere from 50% to 60% of that person’s salary.
• 18% of employees reported that culture is a benefit that would increase engagement and loyalty.

Screening for Soft Skills

Soft skills make a big difference. But, assessing personality traits that will lead to success can be tricky, and avoiding bias is crucial for accurate predictions. Caliper’s six decades of experience and robust personality assessment is perfect for helping you discover the types of personalities that will be successful at your organization and determine how to coach and train your new employees.

Imagine your best employee. Think of the traits that make them such a valuable asset. Imagine if you could clone that employee’s best qualities and create a whole, more balanced team built from amazing employees.

By using assessments in your hiring process, you can get pretty close. Through cutting-edge personality science and decades of research, the Caliper assessment maps your best employees and helps you build success models around your top performers and competency requirements..

Bonus Content: Didn’t Get the Result You Wanted from a Personality Assessment? Here’s What to Do.

Our own Eric Baker explains it this way:

“Your top performers are tops for a reason: they have the right blend of motivators for sales success in your organization. By using assessments to collect personality data from the sales team (including all performance quartiles), you can begin to reveal the differentiators that set your best reps apart. 

These differentiators are the groundwork for a success model based on the behavioral competencies of top performers. Important: This process has to be done scientifically with statistical analysis; it’s not guesswork.”

These hiring guidelines can then assist you in screening, so the people who aren’t right for you from a fit perspective are funneled out, while you can evaluate who to move forward in the process.

Interviewing for Soft Skills

Having this information can be invaluable, especially when combined with an interviewer trained in uncovering soft skills like emotional intelligence, mental toughness or grit, resilience, and other soft skills typically reserved for later in the interview process.

Read More: Is This The Candidate I’m Looking For? 

Training your interviewers, whether HR or hiring managers, to seek out these qualities earlier can save you both time and money. More importantly, you can compare the objective results of the personality assessment against the more subjective views of an interviewer or perhaps a candidate who has all the right qualities to be a top performer at your company, but whose sweaty palms and nervousness made him a flop in the interview. Using The Caliper Profile, your hiring team can also gain insight into how to best interview this person.

Researching for Soft Skills

As you get closer to the right person for the job, rounding out your view of their soft skills is crucial for fit and retention alike. Using a personality assessment to screen and guide is the first, and most important, step.

Training your hiring team to uncover soft skills in an interview setting helps you compare what you see on the resume and in the personality assessment to get a better idea of this person’s soft skills and if those particular soft skills are right for your company.

The third step is checking references to get a better idea of their work style and attitude. How do they put those skills into action on a day-to-day basis? Which of those soft skills were noticeable to their former boss or team? What was their attitude like in stressful situations?

This is the third piece of hiring for fit and retention. Another insight that can stem from digging into work style and demeanor is how you can develop and coach your potential employee. Combined with your scientific personality assessment, a trained interviewer and researching references completes the portrait of the candidate or new team member.

Read More: The Surprising Secret Behind Great Hires and How to Access It

Hiring the perfect fit for your company is possible. With assessments as a guideline for personality fit, interviewing to gauge skills and demeanor, and researching references to understand their work style and attitude, the right candidate will rise to the top.

Ensure an exceptional candidate experience every time! To learn how Caliper can help you increase candidate fit and employee retention, contact our experts today.