Personality is a funny old thing – we’re all generally aware of it and you may have completed a personality quiz or two in the past just for fun, but it’s not something that gets a great deal of thought, particularly in a recruitment scenario. Short of thinking “that person seems like they have a fun personality”, or something similar, it’s not often included in a job description or discussed in an interview.  

Dimensions of personality

There are many different ways that you can describe personality, but in short it involves a unique blend of traits, including our attitudes, thoughts, behaviours, and moods. It also extends to how we express these traits in our interactions with people, and of course the world around us. Some personality characteristics can be inherited, while others are shaped by the life events and experiences that we have. Our personality influences our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours – it’s what makes us the unique individuals that we are.  

So why does assessing personality sometimes get overlooked in the recruitment process? Generally, it’s because without the right tools, it can be a difficult thing to measure and quantify. Plus, knowing how to include it in recruitment without a background in organisational psychology is not easy.  

Getting personality insights the easy way

If personality is so vital in defining who we are as individuals, how can we make better use of the insights that it can give into ourselves and others? Without hiring your own team of organisational psychologists, the easiest way is to invest in a talent assessment platform that allows you to invite your people to take psychometric assessments, which measure behavioural and personality traits as well as aptitudes.  

We’ve been helping businesses around the world to get insights into their people through our assessments for 40 years now. Since its launch in September 2020, the new Thomas talent assessment platform has been making it even easier to gain a deep understanding of your candidates, teammates and employees.  

We’ve just made our Personality assessment available on the Thomas platform to add an even greater depth of insight into your people. Based on the globally recognised and respected Big Five traits psychological model, we’ve optimised the model specifically for use in the workplace, measuring six traits that are vital to understanding people’s potential for success in a role: Conscientiousness, Adjustment, Curiosity, Risk Approach, Ambiguity Acceptance and Competitiveness. 

The benefits of assessing personality

Our pre-employment Personality test gives a deep insight into the traits that drive the way your people work and interact, providing a complete view of elements such as goal setting, coping with stress, handling change, creativity, risk and competition. This insight helps clients to better identify the best-fit candidates for their role and company.  

Thomas Perform, the application used by HR and talent acquisition professionals to gain insight into their people, gives immediately usable content to help you make objective people decisions as soon as the individual has completed their assessment. With a few clicks, you can create an effective psychological profile of the ideal candidate’s aptitudes as well as behavioural and personality traits. Then simply invite your candidates to take assessments and add them to the job profile you’ve created to quickly compare their results against the profile you defined.  

You can use just the Personality assessment, or, to give greater certainty in your hiring, combine it with Behaviour and Aptitude and use our star ratings tool to compare applicants’ assessment results and suitability. A dynamically generated interview guide further supports your hiring process, and is personalised for each individual based on the biggest gaps between their assessment results and the ideal role profile that you created.  

It’s not just you that gains fast value from the assessment – your candidates have instant access to a profile summary based on the assessments that they have completed. This gives them valuable self-awareness, helping them to understand not just why they might behave and work in certain ways, but also how others might view them. This all leads to a better candidate experience, and even unsuccessful applicants will leave the process with the added benefit of instant, discerning feedback. 

Want to know more about using Thomas’ assessments to unleash the power of your people? Get in touch with our experts or read how to attract, recruit and retain the right people for your business.