Job . Employment . Career
Personal Profiling Gives Employers an Advantage in the
Search for New Job Candidates
Companies are gearing up to begin hiring again now that the economic downturn
is taking a nice upswing. The great news for employers is that many workers see
now as the time to consider advancing in their profession. Those people, along
with some exceptional employees who lost their jobs to down-sizing during the
recession, mean that employers have more prime candidates from which to choose
than they’ve had in years.
That’s the good news. The bad news is, it can be difficult
to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially for small businesses
where management often wears many hats in addition to human resources.
Reviewing dozens of resumes and interviews can be time consuming,
and even after that grueling process, there may be up to five
great potential employees. How can you make sure you select the
right person for the job so you don’t have to go through
this long, and costly, process again any time soon?
It could be worth your while to implement a personal profiling
test, like the DISC Personality Profiling Assessment, to provide
another valuable piece of information for consideration when
making hiring decisions. Many companies, both large and small,
find personality profiling to be a valuable tool to discover,
hire, and retain the cream of the crop.
The upper echelons of corporate America is where personal profiling
got its start, but now many human resources departments implement
profiling for all new hires. The tests range from simple online
tests to in-depth interviews with psychologists. Prices are widely
varied as well, depending on the depth of the test. Inexpensive
tests mean that even small companies can afford to implement
an assessment.
Personality assessments not only help you hire the right employee,
they can help you keep them. Long-time HR directors will tell
you that if you hire the candidate best suited for the job, but
also for the work environment, you’ll retain the employee
longer. Employee retention saves companies money and valuable
time due to lost productivity and costs associated with recruiting
and hiring.
The tests consist of questions a job candidate answers to help
an employer determine more about the candidate’s personality
and attitudes. Most personal profiles evaluate a candidate’s
skills or personality. The DISC Personality Assessment provides
information about both. I like that because it gives you even
more of the information you need to make a decision.
DISC is an acronym that stands for:
- Dominance
- Influence
- Steadiness
- Compliance
Learning about these characteristics of a potential employee’s
personality help employers determine if they’ve got the
right person for the job, both in temperament and in the candidate’s
ability to adapt to the corporate culture. If a company is looking
for a chief executive officer, a candidate needs to show some
leadership personality traits such as the ability to persuade
others to follow a vision and the skills to determine a path
to achieve the company’s goals. A chief financial officer,
however, needs to have negotiating ability and the skills to
work with details.
I actually took the DISC Personality Assessment to see for
myself how valuable a personal profile could be. The first part
of the test consists of a series of questions that the candidate
takes online. I got back a comprehensive assessment consisting
of 25 pages. The results were remarkable – my friends and
colleagues alike agreed that the online test nailed every aspect
of my personality.
The second part of the test consists of an interview with an
evaluator to review the results. I learned how my personality
works with other people, how I can communicate better with others
I’m working with and what organizational structure would
best suit me. The same information revealed in my interview would
help an employer determine if a potential new hire will work
well within the organization.
A business making a critical hiring decision often relies on
the first impression that an interview provides. Often, companies
need to look a bit deeper to determine the true substance and
worth of a job seeker’s skill sets and personality, and
how the combination of the two will fit in to the organization.
For example, a new hire may have the best skills in the world,
but if he doesn’t have the communication skills to work
well with your current team, he may not be the best candidate.
It may be in the company’s best interest to hire a good
communicator with average skills that can be improved upon with
training instead.
According to an Oct. 13, 2000 story in BusinessWeek Online,
A survey of 2,100 human resource managers, conducted by the American
Management Association, found that 30 percent were incorporating
personality profiling into their hiring decision-making process.
Those numbers may be on the increase due to the numbers of potential
employees from which to choose.
http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/oct2000/ca20001013_818.htm
But the numbers of plentiful employees may wane quickly now
that the economy is picking up. According to Working Knowledge,
a publication of the Harvard Business School, by 2010 there could
be 10 million more jobs available than there are employees in
the United States. So, any company that finds a tried-and-true
method of hiring the right employee will be ahead of the game.
The same test that could help you narrow the field would be just
as important when there are fewer candidates from which to choose.
http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3803&t=organizations
Some companies have avoided implementing personal profiling
as a hiring tool because of misconceptions surrounding the industry.
It’s easy to understand why. A search on the web for information
about personal profiling brings results ranging from psychological
groups to psychics! Here are some myths about using personal
profiling in mainstream business:
Myth 1: Personal profiling is only geared toward hiring
upper management.
Many corporations are using profiling to determine the best
hires for every position, especially in organizations that are
interested in making sure new hires fit into the corporate culture.
Products available for instant online access and results, like
the DISC assessment, can help tremendously in the hiring process.
Personal profiling can help ensure that any candidate is right
for the job or can work with particular personality types.
Myth 2: Personal profiling is too expensive.
Although you can spend thousands of dollars on a battery of
tests for an upper-management position, some tests, like DISC,
are cost-effective enough to be implemented on a daily basis.
You spend a lot of money and time alone interviewing candidates,
so using the DISC personal profiling test could keep you from
going through it all over again for the same position next year!
When you look at all the costs associated with losing an employee – from
lower productivity to the time spent to rehire and train a new
worker – many companies could actually save money implementing
a pre-employment test.
Myth 3: Personal profiling really isn’t geared
toward small business.
Actually, small businesses may benefit the most from conducting
personal profiling assessments. Nowhere else in industry does
time spent in human resources management chip away at the bottom
line more than in small business. When small business owners
hire a new employee, they’ve got to make sure they’ve
got the right candidate – it’s too expensive to make
a mistake. When a small business owner is running classified
ads, spending time reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates,
it takes significant time away from running the business. Diverting
the entrepreneur away from the business at hand to hire employees
can seriously affect profits. Also, especially in the small business
environment, it’s important a new employee work well with
the owner and the other members of a small staff.
Myth 4: Personal profiling takes too much time.
Granted, some personal profiling tests do take a lot of time.
Some can require candidates to answer hundreds of questions.
Shorter tests, like DISC, can yield a lot of information with
fewer questions. The DISC assessment, for example, only has 24
questions and can be completed in 15 minutes. Because the first
phase of the test is taken online, results take mere minutes.
The interview with a specialist to interpret the DISC’s
results takes anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes. That’s less
than three hours – a fraction of the time it took to recruit
candidates, read resumes and interview applicants!
Myth 5: People can cheat on a personal profiling test.
Personal profiling test questions have no right or wrong answers,
and many, like the DISC assessment, don’t have a lot of
questions that might be perceived as negative to encourage a
candidate to not be truthful. Most human resources managers use
personal profiling tests as just a part of their evaluation of
a potential new hire, and even the experts say that companies
should never base their hiring decisions on the test alone. In
reality, there are a lot of ways an unscrupulous candidate can
cheat the entire hiring process – from padding their resume
to not telling the truth in the interview. Adding more pieces
to the process may help trip them up!
Hiring decisions are rarely easy, and whether it’s feast
or famine – the large pool of candidates today or the slim
pickings predicted in the future – a personal profile assessment
would be an excellent tool to help hire the best person for your
organization. It doesn’t matter if you are a Fortune 500
company or a mom-and-pop retailer – everyone saves time
and money when the right candidate is hired the first time.
Copyright 2004
Kate Smalley
President
Connecticut Secretary
http://www.connecticutsecretary.com |