Use the professional personality test to find quality candidates

Can a professional personality test help to recruit the ideal candidates?

As a human resources manager or recruitment officer, you are interested in understanding the type of person you have in front of you.

You want to understand not only their knowledge and know-how (their business skills), but also their interpersonal skills. In fact, interpersonal and behavioural skills can reveal the applicant's fit with the company's culture, as well as their ability to work within their future team.

Have you tried including a personality test in your recruitment process, to complete an application file or compare your applications?

What are the different types of test and their objectives? How do you read their results?

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What is the purpose of a professional personality test?

In recruitment, to find the ideal candidate, professional personality tests are analytical tools designed to predict an individual's professional behaviour with a certain degree of accuracy. They are essentially used to:

• 😊 assess interpersonal qualities: how the person will behave with others, within a team → their potential for collaboration and rapid integration into your company ;
• ✊ detect motivations: what stimulates your candidate at work? Remuneration, security, the need for recognition or a good work-life balance? → his/her potential to invest in his/her assignments;
• 👐 identify soft skills: depending on the position to be filled, various "soft skills" may be sought in your candidate, such as empathy, creativity, perseverance, all of which are assets to include in the profile of your recruit ;
• 🧘‍♂️ understanding emotional management: in a pressurised professional context, what will be the applicant's ability to control their emotions or react to an urgent or conflictual situation?

💡 These tests enable you to decide between two candidates, when two profiles seem to you to be of high quality. Over and above their skills and similar experience, assessing their personality at work can help you decide on your choice by focusing on soft skills.

[FOCUS] 4 popular professional personality tests

The Big Five or OCEAN test

🎯 Objective: the 5 personality factors test, also known by its acronym OCEAN, is well known in psychology. It is used to precisely define a person's character, according to the following dimensions:

• O for openness to experience
• C for conscientiousness
• E for extroversion
• A for agreeableness
• N for neuroticism

These aspects reveal the personality traits and, in particular, the strengths of the candidate. Based on empirical psychological tests, this test offers a comprehensive and highly reliable approach.

👉 In practice: candidates are given a self-assessment questionnaire and asked to choose the answer that most closely matches their opinion, on a scale of values (from "Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree").
It presents statements such as: "I trust others"; "I complete my tasks successfully"; "I am ambitious" or "I tell the truth".

🔎 How is it interpreted?
The result of this test is a personality score that places the individual on a scale for each of the five major personality traits.

You'll be able to quickly assess whether he or she fits in with the company's culture. The results will be used more judiciously after a feedback interview, which will serve to qualify, invalidate or, on the contrary, confirm them.

The MBTI test ( Myers Briggs Type Indicator)

🎯 Objective: imported from the United States, this free personality test is also very comprehensive, with the aim of identifying a candidate's dominant psychological traits. It is mainly used for management positions involving decision-making and responsibility.

👉 In practice: there are six different versions of this test, with the number of questions ranging from 93 to 222. The person being tested has a choice of two options, and selects the one that is most suitable.

🔎 How is it interpreted?
This test reveals 16 personality types based on two possible preferences in each of the following four aspects:

• energy orientation: extraversion or introversion ;
• information gathering: sensation or intuition ;
• decision-making: thinking or feeling
• mode of action: judgement or perception.

Depending on the personality that this test reveals, you can determine the candidate's affinity for the job and his or her potential for development within your company.

The PAPI ( Personality and Preference Inventory) test

🎯 Objective: widely used by recruiters in France, the aim of this test is to assess an individual's behaviour and motivations in the workplace, based on 10 needs and 10 professional roles.

👉 In practice: there are two types of test:

• the classic test, PAPI-I (ipsative, i.e. forced choice), which consists of 90 pairs of statements relating to the professional environment. The candidate chooses between two sentences, which are not necessarily related.
  For example: 1) I make decisions very quickly or 2) I plan things carefully.
• the normative test, PAPI-N (normative, i.e. with a comparison of results with a standard population), in which the candidate is given 126 statements. Candidates place their answers on a scale of values, from "I strongly disagree" to "I strongly agree".

🔎 How can it be interpreted?

A graph is formed with 22 scales divided into seven main orientations:

• dynamism
• professional awareness
• authority and charisma,
• search for personal results,
• temperament,
• sociability,
• open-mindedness.

You are given an assessment of the candidate reflecting their needs and motivations (such as the need for support from their hierarchy or to belong to a group), as well as behavioural preferences at work (such as planning, leadership, etc.).

After the test, the results can be analysed with the candidate, to give them a chance to react and provide concrete examples based on real-life work situations.

The SOSIE test

🎯 Objective: the primary aim of this test is to create a professional "look-alike" of the candidate: it provides information about an individual's personality, values and sources of motivation.

👉 In practice: the questionnaire consists of 98 items covering 20 dimensions, themselves divided into three categories. During the test, the candidate chooses two answers from among three or four statements: the one that corresponds most closely to him or her and the one that is furthest removed from his or her personality.

🔎 How is it interpreted ?

At the end of the test, a psychological profile emerges, highlighting nine personality traits and 12 values.

The strengths that emerge are presented in an assessment, which can be used as a basis for an interview to discuss the results with the candidate.

[BONUS] 6 tips for recruiting with a personality test

Tip 1: Use a candidate tracking tool

Using a dedicated tool to manage your applications allows you to refine your recruitment and make it more efficient.

Thanks to an Applicant Tracking System, you can avoid any loss of information, especially when your process involves many stages.

👉 Some examples of software :

• Bizneo ATS helps you optimise the management of your candidate data and develop an up-to-date talent database. In particular, you can record all the results, feedback and opinions after an interview or personality test.
• DigitalRecruiters centralises and manages your recruitment while integrating personality tests via partners. This comprehensive ATS offers features such as multi-channel publication of vacancies and real-time tracking of candidates, optimising the selection and cultural fit of candidates with your company.
• monday.com HR is an open and flexible platform for centralising and managing all your applications, once you've passed the tests. All your staff have access to centralised information and can make decisions as a team, simply and at a glance.
• Softy is more than just ATS software, because it goes beyond just managing applications. In fact, it natively integrates unlimited recruitment tests. These tests (around twenty in all) are divided into three categories: personality, cognitive and technical.

Tip 2: Put the test results into perspective

Numerous external factors can interfere with, or even distort, the results of a personality test, such as the conditions in which it takes place or the candidate's subjective interpretation of the statements.

👉 Use the results with hindsight and a critical mind. Candidates are also subjective in their own judgements. You can check that the results are consistent with other information received from the candidate and bear in mind the importance of the results in relation to the post to be filled.

Our advice: centralise the application, the test documents, your marks and possibly those of your colleagues, your comments on a profile, etc. in recruitment software such as Taleez. That way you have a 360° view of an application for evaluating a recruitment test.

Tip no. 3: attach importance to human interaction

If your exchanges have been qualitative, in interviews or on the phone, why not give them their full importance? However tried and tested and scientifically approved they may be, tests are no substitute for human contact.

What's more, isn't your mind already made up before you decide to have a test carried out?

👉 During your discussions, whether in the debriefing after a test or beforehand when you conduct your interview, demonstrate empathy and active listening yourself.

👉 To foster a real bond with potential talent, even from a distance, it's important to be able to rely on a tool that really assists you and helps you make the right choices. Especially if that tool is one of the market leaders, like Zoho Recruit! Awarded for its ability to reduce the number of applicants who drop out, this software proves its worth in helping you put in place the best possible hiring process.

Tip 4: Don't overlook fair and inclusive skills tests

Fair and CV-free skills tests enable companies to assess candidates' skills objectively, without being influenced by their previous professional experience or training.

With the same objective as personality tests, non-intrusive skills tests can also help companies identify hidden talents that might not be visible on a traditional CV.

☝️Ils helps to reduce bias in the recruitment process by focusing on candidates' skills and abilities, rather than subjective criteria such as age, gender or ethnic origin.

That's exactly what the People In platform allows you to do. A truly innovative and intuitive recruitment software, it offers a fairer and more inclusive method by pre-selecting candidates without using CVs, thanks to ultra-personalised skills tests that can be accessed directly from the job advert. The tests are 100% anonymous, designed by educational engineers and take the form of simulations with 100% automated follow-up. The best part? The software can be connected to your existing ATS and offers all the basic functions, such as application management, address book and bulk emailing.

Tip 5: Believe in potential

A professional personality test sheds light on an individual's strengths and weaknesses. If the results show that expectations are not 100% fulfilled, this does not mean that the application should not be given your attention.

👉 Don't be afraid of atypical profiles. They may surprise you with their different backgrounds or singular personalities, but prove to be real driving forces bringing a fresh perspective to the processes in place, or even a new source of motivation for the team.

Tip 6: Opt for collaborative recruitment

Finally, as a recruiter, you can decide to involve other people in the process, whether they are other managers or future colleagues of the person aspiring to the post.

Whether it's for their expertise or their business vision, their participation will enable you to better appreciate the candidate.

👉 To facilitate this collaborative approach, a recruitment solution such as Flatchr allows you to centralise your applications on a single platform and give all stakeholders access to them.

👉 Similarly, Recruitee allows you to manage all your recruitment in collaborative mode and track the status of each application for several people.

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In short, personality tests for managing career development

Also used internally, for career reviews or mobility within the company, personality tests are proving to be interesting tools for monitoring employees and consequently for:

• 💪 reveal an individual's strengths, areas for improvement or any difficulties they may be experiencing, as part of a skills assessment for example;
• 👭 test a person's compatibility with a new team during a transfer or professional mobility ;
• 🏅 take account of each person's individual values when planning personalised training;
• 🤝 s upport employees as they seek professional development, promotion, a position of greater responsibility, etc.

Do you have any other advice? How important are professional personality tests to you? Have you included any in your recruitment process?