Finding the Right Personality fit For your team? What are the Odds..

For many years, I have met several clients who have come up with a job description to define the skills and role functions of the candidates they are searching for.

In many of these instances, I have found that formal job descriptions may be, only a fragment of what defines what the employer is actually looking to find.

In my early years of recruitment, there would be shortlists forwarded, and several rounds of interaction to just find that one candidate that "lights up the spark" for the employer. When asked what stood out for this candidate, there would be talks like " He /She is the ideal candidate for us OR she just gets us and the way we do things...OR She was like a breath of fresh air...very upbeat and brought energy into the room" . Overall they can’t really point to what exactly the candidate said or did among the other qualified?candidates that made him/she the “Great Find”

Yes ,?asides great skills ?we all want to hire employees who have energy and passion for the role, attention to details, strong leadership, fun loving and well blended, Calm and focused etc. While all these attributes are desired BY EVERYONE... sad news is its IMPOSSIBLE to FIND all the attributes in one person . ?

So what do you do? ?FIRST define ?TOP THREE ?attributes that are a MUST HAVE FOR YOU and ?ensure that along side the skills required there are ways to test for these attributes along side the relative interviews.

How do you test for these traits.

Conventionally personality profiles should be the way to go. ?But there can be snags to Personality tests these days.

Being a psychologist and a trained professional in psycho-metrics , I would hate to put down the powers of good personality profiling. However in this part of the world, It gets obvious that high unemployment rates make candidates more prone to biasing the results of their profiles , regardless of how many times they are encouraged to be truthful. Unfortunately many candidates are hired based on a result of a test they were not truthful about and the rest … is History.

My advice Scenarios, Actual test?and observation based assignments, may be more accurate; particularly when selecting the critical role for your organization. Much time should be put in identifying the actual tasks that can showcase the preferred kind of traits desired for a role. The challenge is if ?the employer is willing to put that much time into the search, that is another discussion. I do wonder if the costs of re hire or firing are far less that putting in a good amount of time in the needed searches. Many times the roles are just "too urgent" to wait .

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If you have your ideas on the other ways of conducting good personality recruitment, Do share your thoughts…I would be glad to hear from you.