When Should I Use a Personality Assessment?

We’ve talked before about the best ways to use personality assessments, but when is the right time to use them?

Personality Assessments, when properly used, deliver actionable intelligence about people we work with - whether it be clients, coworkers, supervisors, or executives. Personality assessment tests ask a set of standardized questions to deliver insights that see beyond the experience, interviews, references, resumes, and other traditional ways to get to know someone. They are your go-to for noticeably better hiring, coaching, succession planning, and professional/personal development.

Hiring

Hiring, or selection, is probably the best-known reason for using a personality assessment. Maybe you’ve taken one yourself at some point. Or maybe you’ve seen a documentary about how controversial they can be. The memes are pretty funny, too.

When we use personality tests for hiring people for our organization, we ask a candidate (job seeker) to take an online assessment. When the candidate completes the assessment, we receive a report that describes the candidate according to what the test is designed to measure. Interviews, resumes, and references are popular methods to screen candidates based on the information that the candidates themselves provide. Let’s repeat that last part: information that the candidates themselves provide. We know job seekers are motivated to be hired, so we need to take what they say about themselves with a healthy dose of skepticism.

This is where candidate testing shines through. Where a candidate claims that they pay a lot of attention to details, an assessment can give us insights into how likely it is that they do pay a lot of attention to details - without having to take their word for it. Two weeks into a critical hire is not the time to discover that your charming Dr. Jekyll is actually Mr. Hyde once he settles in.

Coaching and Development

Assessment tests are blind to whether they are testing a job candidate, a coaching or therapy client, or even someone who’s just curious - the assessment produces the same data about an individual. If we trust these insights for hiring the right person for the job, we can also trust these insights to identify our strengths and weaknesses for other noble purposes.

In the same way that we fortify a castle against invasions by assessing its strengths and weaknesses, we fortify ourselves by leaning in to what we are good at and working on our shortfalls. A good coach knows how to consider both our gifts and our blind spots when advising their clients. Also, using personality assessments for clients gives the coach access to insights that might take weeks or months to uncover, if at all.

Coaches use personality data to create development plans for their clients, both professionally and personally. This data enables coaches and clients to have something tangible to target, for example “Client’s goal is to practice assertive behavior in a team setting” or “Client will listen for cues to practice empathy skills with others” or “Client will seek opportunities to develop their natural aptitude for strategic selling.”

Succession Planning

We’ve taken a deep dive into succession planning before and we learned that personality tests can make the difference between a lasting and short-lived company legacy. Imagine if Coca-Cola, General Motors, McDonald’s, or Microsoft never survived past their first CEO. It’s not easy, right? All these legendary companies make use of personality assessments to ensure that their vision endures beyond the lifetimes of their current leadership.

Personality Assessment data tells us what makes the people in a company great (or not so great). When we want to repeat our successes and minimize our failures, we need to the data to understand what got us to this place. Often, we look to an income statement or balance sheet or the entire ledger to understand what brought the organization to this point in time. This makes sense because accounting tools are a record of the company’s transactions. But what, or better, who, is behind these transactions? Economics teaches us that human behaviors turn the wheels of our global economic system. And how do we better understand the mechanics of human behavior? Personality Assessments.

Bottom line: we get valuable insights into ourselves and others when we use personality assessments - insights we might never have the opportunity or perspective to realize. It's up to us what we do with it. If you aren’t using all the available tools to understand the personalities driving the past, present, and future of your business, you really are missing the big picture.