Suky talks about her take on personality assessments during the hiring process, where she sees the value in them, and how hiring companies make mistakes in using them.
Transcription
Hi I’m Suky from Professional Selection. Today I’d like to talk about personality assessments and the value they add throughout a hiring process. Well I think they are an extremely valuable tool, if used correctly. My personal opinion is where they are used as a pass or fail, without any other type of communication with the candidate I think is a bad practice. You are losing a potential great candidate without having even screened and spoken to them. Even if that’s just for 5-10 minutes. At the end of the day we’re dealing with human beings, not products so I would definitely say in my opinion, assessment shouldn’t be the first contact you have with a potential employee. Now as I said they absolutely 100% have a place in the hiring process.
So if you’ve either telephone screened somebody, met somebody in person and then you’ve gotten them to complete your online assessment, it’s a great tool to have a further in-depth conversation with them. It allows you to explore areas that may have come up on the assessment and it gives a candidate the opportunity to explain & engage. You as a hiring manager, it gives you the opportunity to really understand what makes that individual tick, what their motivators are.
All this information is going to be extremely useful to yourself in how you’re managing that individual should they come on to your team.
So absolutely I think in the overall process, online assessments are a great tool it allows the candidate to explain some areas in detail to yourself, it allows you to learn about that candidate and it’s an opportunity to clarify something.
So at the end of day, use the tool but do not use it as a pass or fail right in the beginning. Not only as I said are you losing a potentially great candidate but what’s that candidate experience? Everybody talks about candidate experience. Well in my opinion that’s not a great candidate experience if they’ve just had an online system tell him: “Hey you passed or you failed”. So use it as part of the process, but not in the beginning.
As always, I’m sure there’s many different opinions, we’d love to hear them, so feel free to leave a comment below.
Thanks for listening.
