Personality Counts

Personalities clash or gel. Jobs fit or they don’t. It’s inevitable.

Or is it? What if you could take out much of the guesswork involved in finding the right people to work together, fitting the right people to the right jobs and positioning the right personalities necessary for your company’s stage of development?

HR professionals are doing just that by using an old standby—personality assessments—in new ways. The tests themselves may be familiar, but their application—how, when and where they are used—has changed dramatically in recent years.

For example, South Deerfield, Mass.-based The Yankee Candle Co. first used personality assessments as a leadership-team exercise in May 2003. Since then, the organization’s application of the behavioral instrument has spread like wildfire.

“There are a lot of milestones along the employee life cycle, and we use this tool at every single one of them,” says HR Senior Vice President Martha LaCroix, SPHR. Yankee Candle uses personality assessments to assist with leadership development, individual development, team communications, conflict resolution, coaching and hiring.

Like Yankee Candle, other companies are using these instruments in new ways that span an employee’s entire life cycle with the organization.

What employers aren’t doing is using the tests to weed out applicants who are not a cookie-cutter match of the ideal employee. To the contrary, HR professionals are using personality profiles to analyze the organization’s “bench strength” and to find a variety of candidates who possess the diverse personalities and styles that the organization needs.

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Once used almost exclusively as an additional screening mechanism in the hiring process, companies now integrate personality assessments with skill tests, leadership evaluations, 360-degree reviews, and other performance management processes and systems. Some organizations link personality types to specific job classifications and, in some cases, to best-practice personality profiles of specific positions.

For example, Yankee Candle recently identified its best- and worst-performing store managers—based on performance initiatives—and asked each manager to complete a Predictive Index (PI) personality assessment from PI Worldwide. Armed with the results, LaCroix worked with PI Worldwide consultants to develop a best-practice behavioral profile of a top-performing store manager. The profile looks at work- related qualities such as sense of urgency, independence, motivational drive, communication style and attention to detail.

In light of the results, district managers give more free rein to store managers whose behavioral assessments match the best-practice profile, while lower-performing store managers are encouraged to try out behaviors that might lead to more-productive results.

Tying personality assessments to business performance, as Yankee Candle has done, is ideal, says Patricia Weik, Ph.D., a psychologist and senior consultant and director of research and development for RHR International in Wood Dale, Ill. “Can you correlate the results of personality assessments with harder business metrics? If you have a profile of a supposedly successful salesperson, does that profile link to sales revenue?”

How I Failed to Fool the Assessments

“I would predict that you’re a freelancer rather than an in-house employee of the magazine,” Dennis LaRosee, senior vice president of PI Worldwide, told me over the telephone.

He was right. The rest of LaRosee’s analysis of my Predictive Index (PI), the assessment his firm publishes and administers, would also prove eerily on target—despite the fact that I had, at times, tried to fool the PI and other assessments I completed online from my home office while researching this article. The Hogan Personality Inventory found me “reflective and self-critical” (these descriptions, I was disappointed to see, appeared under “strengths”) and noted that I may “become tense and easily annoyed by minor inconveniences and setbacks—especially during times of stress or heavy workloads.”

Another assessment designed to gauge my C-suite potential found me highly innovative but “below average” for “leadership and drive for results.” A six-factor personality questionnaire placed me in the 99th percentile for “openness to experience” but relegated me to the 25th percentile in “methodicalness.” (I’m not sure that’s even a word, although I’m not inclined to look it up.)

I put less faith in the latter results, however, since I had scored a bit low on the report’s consistency index. The test knew I was fudging some answers—a reflexive reaction to my days as a job candidate. Whenever a recruiter handed me a personality test back then, a voice inside my head would pipe up: “OK, what are they really looking for here?”

Most good personality assessments contain some sort of candor measure, notes James Hazen, president of Applied Behavioral Insights. “If it is a sound assessment, people should not even think about ‘beating the test,’ ” advises Hazen.

I felt a little beat-up, or at least stressed-out, by the tests that asked me to register on a scale of one to five the degree to which I agreed or disagreed with a statement. On those, I resolved not to check neutral, which I feared would peg me as wishy-washy.

Afterward, listening to LaRosee’s comfortable and thorough description of my PI results immediately soothed any tension or anxiety I harbored about my “self pattern.”

If the “world lets Eric be Eric,” LaRosee posed, the world could expect to see a strongly independent, goal-driven individual who courts risk, seeks out new experience and prefers big-picture challenges to nitty-gritty detail work. I listened raptly (I’d no doubt be a “high E” if egotism were a dimension) as LaRosee fleshed out the behaviors of an Eric unfettered by a job description and daily responsibilities. It sounded too good to be true, given the dispiriting results of my other personality assessments.

But that was only part of the story the PI tells. LaRosee then showed me how the assessment indicates I behave given the constraints of my work. Fortunately, there were few gaps between my work and self patterns.

In one of those gaps, I’m more organized and detail-oriented (“methodicalness,” according to my trusty Tenth Edition of Webster’s Collegiate, is indeed a noun) on the job than I am naturally inclined to be away from work. That adaptation makes sense given my line of work, LaRosee noted, and is not too much of a stretch from my self pattern.

He concluded by emphasizing that our session represented only a hypothetical first step in the process of developing successful employees. The ensuing steps depend on how managers use that information throughout the employee’s tenure with the company.

After his concerns about the voices in my head were addressed, my own boss gave me free rein to let Eric be Eric—as long as I immediately stopped referring to myself in the third person.

The answer, from Yankee Candle and other companies that are weaving personality assessments deeper into their human resource processes, is a resounding yes.

Dennis LaRosee, senior vice president of Wellesley, Mass.-based PI Worldwide, sees “much better integration of the recruitment process, selection process, performance manage- ment process, succession planning process, in all sizes of companies.” Based on his experiences, organizations that invest in a personality assessment tool tend to be well positioned to apply the instrument throughout the employee life cycle.

Take training, for example. David Pfenninger, Ph.D., a psychologist and CEO of Performance Assessment Network (PAN) in Carmel, Ind. (with which the Society for Human Resource Management has a business relationship), says some PAN clients use the assessments as much for training and development purposes as they do to strengthen their hiring processes. And many clients use the assessments as less of a screen than as a tool to generate targeted questions for subsequent interviews, massage job duties based on a top candidate’s strengths, and customize training and development programs once a new hire is on board.

If personality assessments are being used more widely, perhaps that’s because they have gained wider acceptance. Pfenninger, whose company sells assessments in 32 different countries, believes the multi-factor (usually there are between four and six) dimensional model of personality assessment has achieved a state of global acceptance in recent years.

Application Expansion

The expanding use of personality assessments means HR professionals are making new use of these tools in a number of areas, especially those that follow:

• Recruiting. Kent Burns, one of Management Recruiters International’s top-producing recruiters and a partner in one of the company’s Indianapolis franchises, uses personality assessments because they help him find diamonds in the rough.

Some of Burns’ clients will consider only candidates with a high “on-paper” pedigree, but those organizations are beginning to hurt for talent at certain levels—a need Burns expects to intensify as the U.S. candidate pool contracts. When Burns finds a talented executive without a Top 25 MBA or other A-player credentials, he summarizes the individual’s skills and his client’s position to a PAN consultant, who then recommends a battery of online personality tests for the recruit.

If the recruit’s results confirm Burns’ instincts about the candidate, he relays the results to his client with the assurance that the candidate will perform on par with executives who own shinier resumes.

Using personality assessments to confirm HR professionals’ instincts is a benefit of these tools, explains James Hazen, Ph.D., a psychologist and founder of Applied Behavioral Insights in Wexford, Pa. “You know you like them,” says Hazen. “Now you can determine exactly why that is and use that criteria for selection, development and retention.”

• Hiring for fit and diversity. Yankee Candle does not use personality assessments as a way of weeding out applicants, LaCroix stresses. Rather, the company uses the tests to ensure a good fit between applicant and position. “We’re not looking for a certain type of personality pattern,” she notes.

Hazen sees more companies that, like Yankee Candle, are using assessments to ensure a good fit. In fact, he sees more hiring managers sharing the results of these assessments with final-stage candidates to gauge their comfort with the job fit and, in some cases, to collaborate on ways to adjust job responsibilities to create a better match.

A personality assessment helped Rebecca Vinton recognize that an employee was not a good match for the job. “I called my counterpart [at company headquarters in Belgium] to discuss a production manager who was struggling in his new role,” reports the recruiting and training manager at Carmeuse North America, a Pittsburgh-based producer of lime. “I told her, ‘When I look at this person, I see a high C, followed by a D,’ ” Vinton recalls, referring to the employee’s “conscientiousness” and “dominance” scores. “She said, ‘Why, of course! That’s why this person is always asking for more information, which is actually a sign of resistance to change.’ ”

Similar Posts:

• Getting A Recommendation From A Past Employer
• Using LunchMeet to Advance Your Career
• Why The Workplace Office Is Becoming Arbitrary
• Top 5 Employment Trends for 2012
• Staying Motivated at a Dead-End Job