Guest Post by Kraig McKee, the medical sales recruiter
If you have been considered for a position with a new company in the last five years, you may have been asked to take a “Personality Assessment”. In my career, I have taken at least 5 of these assessments while employed with organizations as part of personal development. Caliper, Disc, Gallup, HBDI and FiroB are a few of the more popular. I have also administered the various profiles (it depends which is “in” with the organization at that time) to over 50 people that reported to me.
My conclusions:
Regardless of the type of profile, they all yield useful, consistent information.
In my particular case and that of my teams taking the assessment, I believe the results to be 90% accurate. The 10% I don’t agree with on my assessment is really a matter of definition rather than being totally off base. People that vociferously disagree with their results are almost always a personnel issue waiting to happen.
Why?
They have a disconnected self image.
Say what?
They think they have all the skills needed for their job and they are great.
The truth is that is they don’t have the needed skills and probably won’t change.
Translation: They think they are great and they aren’t.
Has the result of an assessment changed a hiring decision?
All assessments are used as a tool in the hiring process.
Just like it is rare that a candidate would be eliminated from a job because of the results, it would be unlikely that you would get the job because of your assessment profile. But, it does happen occasionally and usually turns out to be a positive if handled correctly.
How can it be a positive to the candidate?
There are 2 scenarios that assessments are normally used:
- As a developmental tool at your current employer.
- As a hiring tool in the hiring process.
1) Developmental Tool
As a manager, sometimes you have a really good employee that wants to move to a different role. Maybe they are in a technical staff position and they would like to transition to a line sales position. You like the employee’s values and work ethic and you want to help them advance in their career, but you don’t want to set them up for failure by putting them in a job that doesn’t match their skill set.
They take the test and it shows they don’t like to communicate with people and are introverted.
Now back to the handled correctly part…
A good manager will sit down with the team member and have a conversation about the assessment and try and understand how the team member perceives and interprets the results.
The conversation should be warm and focused on the individual. As you go through the assessment with them and ask their feedback, you will start to get a picture of how that team member sees them self. When you start reviewing some of the needed skill sets for the new job and how their results compare to that, often the team member will see that where they want to go doesn’t utilize their strengths and it would be a really difficult transition.
What happens next? Are they doomed to stay in that role forever?
No.
The manager and the team member work together to assemble a plan that will develop or supplement the areas they would need to be successful. If they are poor public speakers, maybe Toastmasters. If the have no clue what a day in the life of a sales rep is, what about scheduled ride a long days in the field?
If the assessment and the review is done right, both parties leave with a better understanding of the team member and where they want to go in the organization and what skills they will need to be successful in a new role.
2) As a hiring tool in the hiring process.
You normally take an assessment at the very beginning of the interview process or towards the end.
An assessment that is used in the beginning is usually used to screen out people that wouldn’t fit in the job. When I say fit, maybe it is a very technical scientific job and the candidate didn’t have a science degree. The employer may be using an assessment that focuses on abstract reasoning because that is seen as a good measure of intelligence and they are trying to gauge if the candidate will be able to grasp their new technology quickly. If it is an accounting job, maybe the employer is focused more on the candidate’s ability to work by themselves with no direction.
So yes, in those type of skill mismatches, an assessment can keep you from getting a job. In most cases, if you are taking the assessment as a final step to receiving an offer, unless your assessment comes back with anti social behavior patterns, the manager will probably move forward. A good manager believes “Where there is smoke, there is fire” and if the assessment comes back with more than 2 points of contention, they may think they are better off passing on you and moving on to the next candidate.
Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.
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