No matter what your formal position title is, if you’re in charge of making hiring decisions, your job inevitably involves hiring ethics. That is, because you’re responsible for someone entering or not entering the workforce, you most directly impact workplace populations. So, it should go without saying that your hiring processes need to be mindful and equitable, no matter the position you’re hiring for. And only now are many organizations beginning to get candidates to submit a career assessment for a job as part of the hiring cycle.
But, as Sherrie Haynie, Director of US Professional Services for The Myers-Briggs Company notes, “Done right, personality assessment in hiring can reduce discrimination based on gender, ethnicity and other factors.” That is, not all personality assessments are equally unbiased and effective for hiring ethically.
As well, not all personality assessments are equally as effective for your hiring and for candidates to use. So, how do you know which one is best for you and your candidates?
Let’s talk about it!
What Is a Personality Assessment for a Job?
Overall, what most personality assessments within the workplace attempt to do is measure a candidate’s soft skills, such as their ability to handle stress and their behaviors in certain environments. This is to ensure that an employee is likely to both stay at a company long-term and, perhaps more importantly, to thrive in that position and environment.
After all, many career paths have required credentials that are attainable through training. But that doesn’t mean that having those credentials makes an individual well-suited for a given position or field of work.
With this said, these tests do not—or should not—aim to prevent a job seeker from getting a job they want and would be good at. Practically, they’re meant to determine how well-suited a candidate is for a job to prevent them from entering a field that exhausts them or makes them feel unsuccessful.
We, and hopefully many others who offer personality assessments, rather want to empower workers to find and fully utilize the skills and behaviors that make them unique! And there are many assessments out there—all of which target specific aspects of one’s personality to determine certain information about them.
However, the reality is, humans are complex and dynamic. There is no definitive way to encapsulate an entire worker as they always will be with just one assessment done at one point of their career. The point of these tests, then, is to determine how likely a candidate is to succeed in a position or at your organization overall.
How Do I Find Out My Work Personality Type?
Of the many personality assessments there are out there, the vast majority are not free of charge to use, especially those dedicated to measuring personalities within the workplace.
The Workwolf platform as seen on a Workwolf Business Account dashboard.
But we at Workwolf are firm believers in making career-based personality assessments open-access so anyone can find out what career path they should take. That’s why Packfinder, our own career assessment, is free to use.
Packfinder measures a candidate’s likelihood to succeed in 60 different job positions based on a short online questionnaire. It then gathers the information a candidate offers to determine, based on our algorithms and data science, how likely an individual is to succeed in a given job on a scale from 1 to 5.
And these rankings are informed by the career assessment experts from Self Management Group. So, you know for sure you’re making well-informed hiring decisions that are backed by years of research.
Sounds tempting to check out even for those of us with established careers, doesn’t it? Try it out for yourself by creating a complimentary Workwolf personal account to take Packfinder for free.
How Do You Use Personality Assessment Results?
Unlike others who we won’t name here, we at Workwolf don’t hide assessment results behind a paywall.
With Packfinder, users can access their results via their free Workwolf personal account online from any device with internet access. And sure, you can make hiring decisions based on the results and their meanings, as we outline in this results reference guide here.
But, even more effectively, you can filter your candidates based on how their Packfinder results match the job(s) you’re hiring for. That way, your hiring decisions are both equitable and automated—that is, more well informed and easier and faster than doing so manually or with an applicant tracking system.
This works by establishing benchmarks associated with the role(s) at hand. Then, our algorithm matches candidates within a pool to those benchmarks automatically and without considering other identifying factors, like name, age, race, gender, and ability.
And if you know what benchmarks to set for your job postings, you can input them manually. Or, if you’re not an expert in the field, you can instead use our pre-set benchmarks.
Ready to check out all the tools and systems we have in place that can make your job easier and more effective? Sign up for a Workwolf business account here and start measuring candidate potential today!
