Personality profiles, also known as personality assessments or surveys, can be a useful tool to assist with the hiring and development of quality candidates. Whether you’re looking to streamline the hiring process, eliminate uncertainty or simply avoid particular issues that you’ve encountered in the past, personality profiles allow you to gather information that can’t be easily obtained through the traditional interview process.
Although these assessments shouldn’t be used as a make-or-break hurdle for applicants, they can serve you well as a key element within a larger process and provide insights for a new level of dialogue when getting to know people.
Of the dozens of personality assessment tools available on the market, the following four assessments are worth considering.
Clifton Strengths Assessment evaluates various strengths within individuals, assessing the expression of and the combination of each one. These strengths are sorted into four themes, including strategic thinking, relationship building, influencing, and executing. The resulting feedback is designed to clarify the top soft skills of individuals.
DISC Profile centers around four key personality traits: dominance, influence, steadiness and compliance. It’s designed to help people better understand themselves by providing important insights.
Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator offers feedback indicating different psychological preferences in how people make decisions and how they view the world. The results present personal tendencies within the following categories: introversion vs. extraversion; sensing vs. intuition; thinking vs. feeling; and judging vs. perceiving.
PDP ProScan Survey offers insight into an individual’s perception of self, their reaction to their environment and predictable behavior. It identifies strengths and intensities through a system measuring five traits: dominance (the control trait), extroversion (the people trait), pace/patience (the urgency trait), conformity (the structure trait) and logic (the rationale trait).
Personality profiles help identify character traits that are important for a particular job within a pool of top applicants. The ability to see traits such as patience, extraversion, diplomacy and detail-orientation makes these personality assessments well worth investigating.