Like anyone in a recruitment position, I’m not only interested in the past and achievements of candidates, but also in the way they work, what I call their “internal software”. This is what interests me most.
Indeed, it’s not so difficult for a candidate to disguise his personality in an interview or in a “normal” work context, but what interests me is how he reacts under stress , and in this case it’s his inner personality that takes over.
It’s not so much that I want to test their nerves on a daily basis – in fact, it’s quite the opposite – but I mainly recruit managers and executives, and this is unfortunately part of their daily lives, and I want to know how they behave in these moments (CRM can save your business, but not the CRM you think!).
I also attach great importance to the complementarity of profiles within a team. Firstly, because recruiting your own clone is a bad idea (Recruiting one’ s clone: reassuring at the beginning, penalizing in the long term), but just as it’ s well known that diversity is beneficial to a team, a diversity of profiles on this dimension offers managers more options depending on the situation and the mission entrusted, and helps create balanced teams that will offer varied solutions and avoid “group thinking”.
That’s why, like everyone else, I’m very interested in personality tests, and while we’re at it, a bit of free publicity never hurts, so I’d like to say how much I approve of Predictive Index and the support it provides.)
Except that talking about personality tests is not only a misuse of language , it’s even counterproductive.
When there’s no right answer, there’s no test
I said misuse of language because a test means a true or false result, a final score.
We pass or fail based on totally objective criteria.
A test is binary: the answer is right or wrong, you pass or fail, and the test carries with it the notion of performance.
This is not the case with personality tests in recruitment.
The result of a personality test is not the answer to a question, it’s not a mark out of 100, it’s not yes or no: it’s you.
Unless you consider people to be errors (which is morally difficult to justify), you can’t talk about a test without committing an misuse of language.
So a personality test is not a test, because the notion of performance is absent.
There’s no point in stressing candidates unnecessarily
Paradoxically, I like to know how people function under stress, but I think that stressing people out in recruitment is pointless, and certainly not for me.
The very notion of a test and the idea of passing or failing it can therefore induce unnecessary stress.
Worse still, it can lead them to want to “perform well” or to give answers that are perceived as ideal rather than sincere, thus skewing the result.
Tests” are only diagnostic tools
Let’s repeat once again that these tools do not diagnose a “good” or “bad” personality.
These tools should be used to inform a decision, to understand a situation a posteriori in order to resolve it, but not to decide on recruitment or promotion.
They simply explore dimensions that enable a better understanding of how a person might fit into a team or react in a given context.
It’s a support, a help, not an absolute truth.
The proof: for a specific job, I had determined a typical profile that had given complete satisfaction until the day I recruited a candidate who was practically the antipodes on every dimension.
Why did this happen? I was convinced by what I learned from the interviews, and I have a friend with exactly the same profile who has made a remarkable career in positions requiring similar qualities, the “internal software” being merely the way in which they express and implement them.
In the end, this recruitment was a great success, not only because of the person’s performance, but also because of what she brought to the team through her “difference”.
So it’s out of the question to use them on their own, unlike real aptitude or knowledge tests.
Terminology affects the candidate experience
A good recruitment experience should be non-stressful and non-intimidating. In addition, each step should have a non-sibylline name that clearly indicates its objective.
Finding terms other than “test” will send the message to candidates that we want to understand them, not judge them.
Bottom line
What we usually refer to as personality tests in recruitment not only fail to meet the definition of a test, but can also detract from the candidate experience, stress them out and even bias the results.
So let’s get a little creative and come up with other terms such as personality inventory, behavioral preference questionnaire, behavioral profiling, individual discovery tool…
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