One of the best ways to assess employees is with personality tests. Read on to learn about the benefits of employee personality testing.
Have you ever heard the expression “It takes a village to raise a child?” It applies to workplaces as well. It takes all sorts of people and types of thinkers to produce a successful workplace.
Not only does it take all those people to create success, but you need diversity when it comes to company culture.
Want to learn more about employee personality testing and how it can make your business better? Read on below.
Create Better Teams
Depending on the personality tests that you choose, you can predict how different people will interact in the workplace. Granted, you’d have to know your current employees results to calculate this.
That said, your employees are likely willing to take a personality test.
Once you have your results, there are two trains of thought when it comes to comparability. Do opposites attract or are they too different to work together?
Teaming Opposites Together
When you team up two people who are opposite on the personality scale, they’ll either work well together or crash. In the relationships where they work well together, one person can fill the weaknesses the other person has.
For example, if you pair a very big-picture person with a detail-oriented one, they’re going to do a more thorough job. But that’s only if the oversight of the details doesn’t overly bother the detail-oriented person.
Or vice versa. It’s incessantly annoying for someone who thinks in big pictures to have to figure out details.
Teaming Like-Minded Employees Together
The same theory holds true for similarities.
If you have two people working closely together who are the same personality type, they’ll likely get along. Yet, when it comes to work, they don’t have someone else to balance out their shortcomings.
For example, let’s say there were two detail-oriented people working together. The details would be more than covered, but they may totally miss out on how all of it will come together.
On the other hand, these two people may see too much of themselves in others and get annoyed at the other person.
It’s all about balance and, in the case of types working together, teaching people how to appreciate what others have that they don’t.
It Makes Hiring Easier
Most hiring managers or businesses don’t go into the hiring process by saying, “I will only accept an Openminded Extravert.” That wouldn’t be time or cost-effective.
But, you do know that someone working in a social work field needs to have the Openness and the Extraverted parts. These two traits mean they not only are comfortable around people, but they can also better perceive how they’re feeling.
These are important traits in a people-driven business, but not so much in highly technical jobs. For example, you don’t want your doctor making a choice because they think it’s what the patient wants.
You want someone who can judge and deliver a relevant solution to the situation (more questioning and conservative).
And these aren’t things you can learn about a person with classic interview questions. You’re not going to figure out if someone perceives or judges by simply asking “Why do you want this job?”
It Improves Retention
Sometimes there are employees that are really good at what they do, but they’re not really a fit in the workplace. When that happens it’s a bad fit for both parties.
Eventually, they’ll leave or they’ll feel burnt out and they’ll stop doing their job as well.
When they leave or stop performing at their peak, you’re losing a great employee and they’re losing their sanity.
You can’t always prevent this, but you can use different types of personality tests to help avoid it.
For example, if everyone in the organisation is an extrovert, an introvert is going to feel highly uncomfortable and vice versa. This is a key dimension measured in the Big Five personality tests such as the OCEAN Occupational Personality Assessment.
Facilitate Better Interviews
When you already know the type of person you’re looking for, you can weed out others by using targeted personality type questions. Depending on the position, it won’t always be cost-effective to test every applicant first.
You may only test your final 10 or 20, in the second or third round of interviews.
Additionally, you can talk to candidates more openly about their weaknesses, once you know their personality type. Asking someone what their weakness is in an interview rarely gets you an honest answer.
But if you know the weaknesses of their general personality type, you can ask specific questions that are more telling of the person as an employee.
Makes People Feel Valued
Even if you don’t end up hiring someone, taking the time to give them a personality test (and giving them access to the results) shows applicants you care. It reveals you’re invested in not only the position you’re trying to fill but also in them and helping them avoid an ill-fit.
It may not seem like much, but compared to the very basic and cold interviews most employers give, it can go a long way.
Even if you don’t hire them, they’ll learn valuable things about themselves in the process. With that new knowledge, they can seek out positions that are a better fit for them in the future.
Benefits of Employee Personality Testing
Whether you choose to test new applicants or backpedal and test your current employees, you’re not going to regret finding out more about your team. If you invest in learning about the results, you can change your entire company culture and how people interact.
Giving out a few tests could not only improve relations around the water cooler, but it could also help people work harder and smarter.
Sound like something you’d like for your business? Learn how you can access employee personality testing for your business.
