Top 5 tips: Leveraging personality profiling in interviews
During recruitment, personality profiling can be a great resource to support decision making, guide conversations, to build understanding, and identify areas of concern.
When used effectively in interviews, personality profiling can also play a vital role in guiding the conversation to:
Deep dive into critical areas
Chat through and understand gaps
Build a shared understanding for the conversation
Explore cultural fit and motivations
And so much more!
Today we share our Top 5 tips on using personality insights effectively in interviews – a couple of quick ideas to help you get more out of your interviews.
This month TALY is super excited to announce the launch of TALY’s new, AI-driven candidate interview tool!
The TALY interview tips bring together…
scientifically-backed personality profiling
tailored to the needs of your business, culture and the role
delivered through customised, locally-built AI tools to ensure accuracy
With the new solution, you get simple ideas on what to dive into in the next interview to really dig into candidate fit, and to make sure you’re making the right decision!
And the best part – all TALY personality profiles for recruitment now include these interview recommendations at no extra cost!
Get in touch to find out more about how you can use TALY profiling to give you interview super-powers! Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.
1. Be prepared to be flexible
Using an individual’s personality profile to guide the interview process and to make sure you are deep diving on the priority areas means you’ll need to step away from the same preset questions for every candidate.
There are many proponents for structured interviews, and there are many benefits. Maintaining some rigour in the process is important to minimise bias and to give each candidate a similar opportunity and experience.
But there are also critics, with data suggesting that structured interviews can actually lead to less consistent outcomes. Being too rigid won’t help you explore the person in a relevant way.
So be ready to be flexible and to follow the personality data to guide the conversation. This can be a little challenging at first – but you’ll quickly feel your interviews developing into rich, meaningful conversations.
2. Stress test the strengths
One key element of personality profiling is identifying where an individual aligns well with the needs of the role.
Stress-testing this alignment, and looking for developed skills, habits and expertise, can help to support your decision making by ensuring that the alignment really exists in the way you need it to.
We say it a lot at TALY – there is no right or wrong personality. Exploring each individual and the complexity of their personality, and how these traits come to life for them, is really the only way of being confident around what you experience with them will be like if they actually come into the role.
Consider using scenarios to explore and test how these personality traits come to life. For example, if someone shows a high level of drive, ask them to share examples of how their drive towards outcomes has come to life at work before and lead to positive outcomes. Listen for cues around their behaviour, to ensure their approach and style lines up with your needs.
3. Stress test the gaps
In modern business today, there is no thing as a right or wrong personality fit. While some providers still provide norms or benchmarks, it’s time to let this go. Each individual, each team, each role and each business is different – and trying to jam benchmarks into your business reality can be very misleading.
However, each role has certain requirements, and these will align more naturally to certain traits. If an individual shows a score that doesn’t quite line up, you need to stress test this.
Imagine an accountant with a low level of order (a sub-trait of conscientiousness). Accountants naturally need to keep things organised, to align to process and structure. Their low score doesn’t mean they aren’t right for the role – and in fact it might bring an interesting perspective to your team.
But at the next interview, bring this up with them…
“Your personality shows a relatively low level of order, but in the role, maintaining a strong alignment to process is important. Can you tell me a little about how you manage this, can you give me some examples.”
In the stress test, what you are looking for is:
That they are self-aware
That they have built habits, behaviours, ways of working that help to manage this
That you are confident that they can manage this in a way that aligns with your workplace.
4. Explore team dynamics
It’s great to use profiling to understand the candidate. But let’s not forget that they are about to join a team.
Use the personality mix of the team to explore scenarios around areas like inter-personal skills, conflict resolution and diversity by looking at where there might be alignment and where there might be tension.
In this area, you’re looking to understand their self-awareness, examples of how they have worked collaboratively with differing personalities and an understanding of their emotional intelligence.
If it’s a leadership role, this could be a really helpful conversation not just for you, but also for the candidate. During the interview process, they’ll get a strong picture of the team they are about to connect with.
5. Take note of the ongoing watchouts
Our decision on who to bring into a role is based on many factors. At TALY, we love personality. But it’s not everything.
You’ll select a candidate based on personality along with culture fit, experience, skills, education, network, business strategy, manner and many more things.
So if there are gaps in the personality and if you have concerns, don’t forget about these. While you may be able to manage these, or the candidate may believe they can, how it actually plays out once they start in the role can be a whole other story.
Don’t ignore this – paying close, critical attention during the early days for a new team member is super important.
Ongoing feedback can help, along with awareness – but just ignoring the problem and hoping it resolves itself never ends in a good place.
The TALY platform sends you little reminders during the probation period to help with this – you should check it out!
Above all, the main secret to effectively using profiles during recruitment is openness. An interview is just two humans having a chat – we are who we are, and the more honest and transparent we are, the better the outcomes for all.
If you want to find out more about leveraging the broad impacts that personality profiling can bring to your business, get in touch today and be sure to follow TALY Australia on LinkedIn.
The TALY approach to personality profiling brings together a unique mix of Five Factor and Emotional Intelligence profiling to help organisations, hiring managers and teams to make better decisions about recruitment and teams.
Get in touch to find out more… we love talking about this stuff! Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.