It’s never been more challenging to recruit the right people for your business. Talent shortages are at their highest level in over a decade, with three in four employers reporting difficulty finding appropriate candidates to fill their vacancies. Businesses are doing everything they can to attract top talent, but with the cost of a bad hire estimated at 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings, evaluating just who is the right fit remains crucial. Hiring managers understand that there’s no perfect approach to hiring talent, so they need to employ every tool at their disposal.
Personality tests have long been used by companies to aid in the hiring process. They can be used to build a candidate profile that helps recruiters determine their potential fit for an organisation, understand how to keep them motivated, and lessen the chance of placing them in the wrong position. By getting this hiring process right, organisations can reduce the likelihood of the employee leaving, increase their productivity, and foster long-term company loyalty.
Hogan Assessments
Among the foremost personality tests are the Hogan Personality Assessments. Trusted by 75% of Fortune 500 companies to predict workplace performance accurately, these tests are based on peer-reviewed research. Validation has been obtained through more than 700 validation studies and 250 criterion-related validation studies. Hogan Assessment tests can be used for a range of talent-management tasks, from pre-hire selection to executive-level development, providing insights that can help drive strategic decisions throughout the employee life cycle.
Hogan Assessments measure reputation rather than identity. This is important, as reputation is a reflection of one’s behaviours and social skills, instead of one’s internal narrative. This is what makes it suitable for evaluating job fit, considering that reputation is key to workplace success. The company offers a range of tests that can help employers evaluate the suitability of a candidate for a position.
Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI)
This assesses how a person relates to others when they are at their best. It measures adjustment, ambition, sociability, interpersonal sensitivity, prudence, inquisitiveness, and learning approach. The HPI can indicate how they work and lead, as well as their chances of success within your organisation. Hiring managers use it to create a picture of someone’s personality to see if their personal characteristics align with the requirements of a particular job. It can also be used to judge someone’s career potential across a range of occupations.
Hogan Development Survey (HDS)
The HDS assesses how people behave during difficult times – when they’re vulnerable, bored, or under pressure, for example. What emerges can have negative consequences for reputation and relationships. It measures qualities including caution, boldness, imagination, excitability, scepticism, diligence, and duty. The point of the test assessment is to identify how people react under strain, in order to understand and mitigate any risks to their job performance. It can be used in conjunction with the HPI and MVPI to holistically understand a candidate’s personality.
Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI)
This assesses what motivates people to succeed – their interests, values, goals, and so forth. The MVPI evaluates metrics such as recognition, power, hedonism, altruism, tradition, security, aesthetics, and science. Understanding what motivates people is key to getting the best out of them, along with understanding the best kind of job and environment for them to maximise their productivity.
The benefits of using Hogan Assessments
By assessing a candidate’s personality in multiple dimensions, personality tests, in particular Hogan Assessments, build a complex, in-depth understanding of their character. This can yield critical insights about who the candidate is and how they will behave in a work environment.
Personality tests such as Hogan provide an objective, comparable measure of a person’s suitability for a job. It eliminates potential bias, levels the playing field for candidates, and makes them feel they’ve been given a fair opportunity regardless of whether or not they get the job.
Moreover, conducting Hogan Assessments on existing staff as well as new hires enables you to build up an in-depth database of employee personality traits. This is hugely helpful in hiring because the best fit for the job is also the best fit for your team. Effectively, the more widely your workforce has been assessed, the more valuable the assessments become. By comparing assessment results for applicants with those of the people they’ll be working with, you’ll glean even greater insight into their likely interactions, struggles, and ultimate chance of success within the company.
This demonstrates how personality tests feed into a more holistic approach to talent management, where the hiring process is about assessing an applicant’s potential performance across their entire life cycle within the organisation, alongside the life cycle performance of other staff who will interact with and be impacted by the performance of the new employee.
How to use Hogan Assessments in hiring
The key is to use the assessments correctly. While they can be introduced at any time during the process of hiring a new employee, the earlier you use them, the better. This is because personality tests help to eliminate unconscious bias, which can unfairly affect an applicant’s chances. Using an assessment will ensure you hire the person who’s best for the job, not the person who merely appeals to the interviewer or hiring manager on a conscious or subconscious level.
It’s also important to understand that personality tests are just one tool to be used in the complicated hiring process. Combined with standardised interviews, reference checks, and skills assessments where necessary, they can help companies distinguish the best possible job candidates and hire the cream of the crop.
Find your next best hire
If you’re ready to supercharge your talent search using Hogan Assessments, speak to an expert about how they can assist your organisation. With four decades of experience in helping companies hire the right people, Talent Select are experts in personality assessments, applying a range of assessments, including Hogan, to help organisations find the best of the best. Get in touch to see how we can help.