The pros and cons of using personality profiling as a recruitment aid.
Help take the guesswork out of recruitment with the use of Personality Profiling.
Personality profiles have become an essential tool for employers who want accurate assessments of potential employees. “Nearly three quarters of UK companies now rely on psychometric profiling when recruiting.” States the British Market Research Bureau in a recent article in the Times. It is standard for employers to use profiling to understand, enhance and improve personal and team performance.
But which one do you choose? There are so many psychometric tools from which to choose it helps if you are clear about exactly what it is you wish to measure. Based on a recent on line poll the most popular uses of Personality Profiles falls into three distinct areas:
Recruitment and Candidate Selection
Mainly to provide insight and reduce risk.
Employee Growth and Development
To ensure employers retain and make the most of key staff.
Temperament and Team Building - significantly improve interpersonal communication and productivity both internally and externally.
There is no doubt that personality profiles can provide insight in these areas and generate measurable improvements. Yet this trend is not a modern phenomenon as the basics of personality profiling has been around for a long time. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator was developed in the 1950's and is still popular now even though this was based on the work of Carl Jung in the 1920's. The lineage of personality profiling can be traced back through the centuries, right back to Plato around three hundred and forty years before the birth of Christ.
Surprisingly the basic nature of all personality profiles has remained surprisingly static in all that time. They measure an individual's psychological attributes using one of two different styles or instruments:
Aptitude Tests: These mainly consist of "right" (like me) or "wrong" (not like me) answers. They are constructed to measure a person's ability or aptitude. Some tests gauge someone's verbal or numerical skills and are used when a particular skill or aptitude is required to do a job. So, aptitude tests tend to be used to measure “hard” skills.
Open Ended Questionnaires: Typically there are no right or wrong answers because questionnaires consider someone's characteristics or how they prefer to behave. Open Ended Questionnaires tend to be used to measure “soft” skills.
So whilst it is true that a psychometric profile may provide some rigor to the process of recruiting, give confidence in making the right decision and perhaps help to appoint the right person. They are not always an objective mechanism to short list candidates or eliminate those individuals without the right temperament.
When Profiles Go Bad
The issue is not the process but the nature of how the information is gathered. Both test and questionnaire based profiles use a linguistic base to drive the profile. And these questions, or variations of them, have been around for a long time. People who are exposed to them are becoming used to the style, pattern and content. Cheating is common place, in fact you can by books and attend courses in how to answer the questions in a way that changes the profile.
Results are easy to manipulate, even without any detailed "inside knowledge". For example the question below was taken at random from a widely used and popular test. Does interacting with strangers (a) energise you or (b) tax your reserves?
Frankly, it doesn't take much understanding of psychometric profiles to realise that this question is measuring your preference for social interaction. Most popular profiles would define this trait as Introversion or Extroversion. If you have a basic understanding of personality profiles you could predict the employer's requirements, modify your answers and alter your profile. As familiarity with the questions and interview coaching increase the effectiveness of profiles increasingly diminishes. This is a growing concern for employers and the profiling industry.
To combat this trend modern psychometric tests are emerging that record the subject's response to non-verbal stimuli. The techniques used work at a deeper more unconscious level, which makes them much harder to predict or second guess. There is even a suggestion that the answers given are more accurate, eliminating the other issue with traditional profiles which is the number of questions that need to be asked. Instead of spending ten, fifteen or thirty minutes often a visually based psychometric profile can often be completed in less than a minute. You can try an example of this style of test at personaliteye.com. Another advantage of this "non-verbal" style is that the applicant's language skills are less of an influence on the result.
If words and questions are being replaced by images and preferences, perhaps this will make psychometric profiling not only faster, fun and more accurate.
