Are Personality Tests A Successful Employee Selection Technique?

Companies worldwide have used personality tests (otherwise known as either psychological or psychometric tests) as an employee selection technique for a long time, with limited success.

Any successful employee retention strategy needs to take into account the fact that high employee turnover rates are caused primarily by two issues:

• Recruitment Methodologies
• Management Techniques

To be successful, shortcomings in both these areas need to be identified and addressed.

Yet, in most organizations, these are managed as two separate activities.

When you integrate the two, however, you discover that a successful employee retention strategy contains both of the following:

• Employees have to be matched to jobs and,
• Management processes have to be matched to employees.

During our research, we learned that different types of people respond differently to different management techniques. It also turns out to be essential that any successful employee selection and retention program takes these differences into account.

Companies worldwide have used personality tests as a recruitment technique for employee selection for a long time.  In the US, pre-employment screening tests have been used more extensively since 1988 when federal law banned the use of polygraphs by employers.

Personality tests use a multiple-choice questionnaire to produce a text/graphical report which describes an individual’s behavioral traits. Personality tests were invented by Raymond Cattell, a world-renown psychologist at the University of Illinois. Initially, these tests were used in the field of clinical psychology. When he developed the technique, he made the point that such tests describe an individual’s personality not how the person will perform in a specific role.

Performance Profiling is the alternative to personality testing.

The technique of Performance Profiling was developed by us especially to help organizations implement successful employee retention strategies by linking together recruitment and management into one cohesive process. The technique overcomes known limitations in the use of personality tests for recruitment screening purposes. Performance Profiling helps organizations improve both job applicant screening and employee management through a better understanding of both job applicants and employees in each of the following areas:

• Core behavioral traits and motivations
• Role-related performance issues
• Employee-specific management needs

Unlike a personality (or psychometric) profile, which is created by correlating the way a group of test subjects answer questions in a questionnaire with their traits as described by people who know them well, a performance profile is created by correlating the way a group of test subjects answer questions in a questionnaire with their traits, motivations, and role-related performance as described by their managers.

The Performance Profile describes both core behavioral traits and motivations together with information covering how an individual will be likely to perform in a specific role. This description includes both the performance ratings an individual will be likely to achieve and issues that need to be taken into account in the management of the individual.

In creating performance profiling technology, it is necessary to correlate the way in which people answer behavioral questions to the actual performance ratings they obtain in their roles. The development of a Performance Profile is much more time-consuming and complex than that of a personality test and the resulting instrument can be used to predict role-related performance of a job applicant.

Behavioral questions are designed to elicit how an individual might behave from how they feel about different types of situations. For example, experience shows that people who answer yes to the question, “Does untidiness make you annoyed?” are more likely to be tidy themselves. Experience also shows that employees who are tidier, typically achieve higher performance ratings in roles that have a significant element of administration.

The Performance Profiles inventor, The Cambridge Don, is a fully accredited member of the Association of Test Publishers and developer of the Talent Chaser employee recruitment and management software.

Talent Chaser’s Performance Profile is a user-friendly human resource tool that accurately predicts whether the individual completing the Performance Profile Questionnaire is well suited for the open job position.

Using job-specific performance factors, it estimates the possibility the individual will obtain high- performance ratings in the specific role applied for. This is accomplished by linking to the Performance Appraisal process and identifying which behaviors traditionally have led to high -performance ratings in specific roles throughout an organization.

Test the Talent Chaser Performance Profile and receive FREE Feedback from one of our certified consultants. Click on the button below for your FREE Performance Profile Test.

Has your organization been using Personality tests?

We would love to hear from you and welcome your comments below. Please don’t forget to Like, Share, Tweet, Google+, and Pin my post. Thanks!