A large part of the human capital supply chain is the acquisition and sourcing of many talents – but the process of obtaining these assets in the first place is also an important detail. Resumes are read, interviewees are spoken to, and decisions are made. Quality hiring practices are too frequently abandoned because of the inconvenience of finding the proper employee in a sufficient amount of time. There are a number of ways to ease the process and the one I’m addressing today is personality testing. The use of personality testing can be quite beneficial in the streamlining of the hiring process and here are three
reasons why:

1. Personality testing can help reduce turnover in your company. Certain office jobs require certain personality traits all around – a personality test can help you find people who truly are ambitious about things that are key in your company. For example, let us say that a large part of a potential job requires a person to perform a series of highly specialized tasks, it would be best to find a person that is genuinely interested in doing detailed work. Certain series of questions can show whether or not a person is genuinely interested in such a thing instead of saying it for a better chance at being hired.

2. Personality testing can help illuminate traits that are not easily measured through interviews. Let’s say that you are looking to hire a late night help desk person to sit and answer phones at a help desk for all hours of the night. A person ideal for that position would have to introverted and extroverted traits combined since they will both be alone at their desk but talking to people on the telephone. They would have to be interested in helping others, be willing to know immensely about whatever product or service it is that they are helping with and patient in the case of confrontation. Certain traits like these are not the sort of things you can see in an interview – like that of being introverted and extroverted in different ways – so a personality test helps you to add another layer to your interviews.

3. Personality testing can help you gather data about what works successfully within your business. By testing employees before hiring and comparing their traits to your best performers, you can later analyze this data to see which test scores work best in the dynamic of your office. If you have a string of people you’re hiring leave shortly after their being hired, you can look back to see if there were any trends within their testing. This goes the same way for those who stay with your company for longer amounts of time. This will allow you to focus more on the traits and skills inherent in
the employees that mesh best.

Introducing personality testing as a part of your hiring process takes away a level of mystery that may be challenging later on when you are addressing other parts of the human capital supply chains. To stay at the edge of issues on HR and staffing, be sure to subscribe to the Human Capital Supply Chain Blog.