Companies are gearing up to begin hiring again now that the 
economic downturn is taking a nice upswing.  The great news for 
employers is that many workers see now as the time to consider 
advancing in their profession.  Those people, along with some 
exceptional employees who lost their jobs to down-sizing during 
the recession, mean that employers have more prime candidates 
from which to choose than they’ve had in years.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is, it can be difficult 
to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially for small 
businesses where management often wears many hats in addition 
to human resources.  Reviewing dozens of resumes and interviews 
can be time consuming, and even after that grueling process, 
there may be up to five great potential employees.  How can you 
make sure you select the right person for the job so you don’t 
have to go through this long, and costly, process again any 
time soon?

It could be worth your while to implement a personal profiling 
test, like the DISC Personality Profiling Assessment, to provide 
another valuable piece of information for consideration when 
making hiring decisions.  Many companies, both large and small, 
find personality profiling to be a valuable tool to discover, 
hire, and retain the cream of the crop.

The upper echelons of corporate America is where personal 
profiling got its start, but now many human resources 
departments implement profiling for all new hires. The tests 
range from simple online tests to in-depth interviews with 
psychologists.  Prices are widely varied as well, depending on 
the depth of the test.  Inexpensive tests mean that even small 
companies can afford to implement an assessment.

Personality assessments not only help you hire the right 
employee, they can help you keep them.  Long-time HR directors 
will tell you that if you hire the candidate best suited for 
the job, but also for the work environment, you’ll retain the 
employee longer.  Employee retention saves companies money and 
valuable time due to lost productivity and costs associated 
with recruiting and hiring.

The tests consist of questions a job candidate answers to help 
an employer determine more about the candidate’s personality 
and attitudes.  Most personal profiles evaluate a candidate’s 
skills or personality.  The DISC Personality Assessment provides 
information about both. I like that because it gives you even 
more of the information you need to make a decision.

DISC is an acronym that stands for:

· Dominance

· Influence

· Steadiness

· Compliance

Learning about these characteristics of a potential employee’s 
personality help employers determine if they’ve got the right 
person for the job, both in temperament and in the candidate’s 
ability to adapt to the corporate culture.  If a company is 
looking for a chief executive officer, a candidate needs to 
show some leadership personality traits such as the ability to 
persuade others to follow a vision and the skills to determine a 
path to achieve the company’s goals.  A chief financial officer, 
however, needs to have negotiating ability and the skills to 
work with details.

I actually took the DISC Personality Assessment to see for 
myself how valuable a personal profile could be.  The first 
part of the test consists of a series of questions that the 
candidate takes online.  I got back a comprehensive assessment 
consisting of 25 pages.  The results were remarkable – my 
friends and colleagues alike agreed that the online test 
nailed every aspect of my personality.

The second part of the test consists of an interview with an 
evaluator to review the results.  I learned how my personality 
works with other people, how I can communicate better with 
others I’m working with and what organizational structure would 
best suit me.  The same information revealed in my interview 
would help an employer determine if a potential new hire will 
work well within the organization.

A business making a critical hiring decision often relies on the 
first impression that an interview provides.  Often, companies 
need to look a bit deeper to determine the true substance and 
worth of a job seeker’s skill sets and personality, and how the 
combination of the two will fit in to the organization.

For example, a new hire may have the best skills in the world, 
but if he doesn’t have the communication skills to work well 
with your current team, he may not be the best candidate.  
It may be in the company’s best interest to hire a good 
communicator with average skills that can be improved upon 
with training instead.

According to an Oct. 13, 2000 story in BusinessWeek Online, 
A survey of 2,100 human resource managers, conducted by the 
American Management Association, found that 30 percent were 
incorporating personality profiling into their hiring 
decision-making process.  Those numbers may be on the increase 
due to the numbers of potential employees from which to choose.

http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/oct2000/ca20001013_818.htm

 

But the numbers of plentiful employees may wane quickly now that 
the economy is picking up.  According to Working Knowledge, a 
publication of the Harvard Business School, by 2010 there could 
be 10 million more jobs available than there are employees in 
the United States.  So, any company that finds a tried-and-true 
method of hiring the right employee will be ahead of the game.  
The same test that could help you narrow the field would be 
just as important when there are fewer candidates from which 
to choose.

 

http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3803&t=organizations

Some companies have avoided implementing personal profiling as a 
hiring tool because of misconceptions surrounding the industry.  
It’s easy to understand why. A search on the web for information 
about personal profiling brings results ranging from 
psychological groups to psychics!  Here are some myths about 
using personal profiling in mainstream business:

Myth 1: Personal profiling is only geared toward hiring upper 
        management.

Many corporations are using profiling to determine the best 
hires for every position, especially in organizations that are 
interested in making sure new hires fit into the corporate 
culture.  Products available for instant online access and 
results, like the DISC assessment, can help tremendously in the 
hiring process.  Personal profiling can help ensure that any 
candidate is right for the job or can work with particular 
personality types. 

Myth 2:  Personal profiling is too expensive.

Although you can spend thousands of dollars on a battery of 
tests for an upper-management position, some tests, like DISC, 
are cost-effective enough to be implemented on a daily basis. 
You spend a lot of money and time alone interviewing candidates, 
so using the DISC personal profiling test could keep you from 
going through it all over again for the same position next year! 
When you look at all the costs associated with losing an employee 
– from lower productivity to the time spent to rehire and train 
a new worker – many companies could actually save money 
implementing a pre-employment test.

Myth 3:  Personal profiling really isn’t geared toward small 
         business.

Actually, small businesses may benefit the most from conducting 
personal profiling assessments. Nowhere else in industry does 
time spent in human resources management chip away at the bottom 
line more than in small business.  When small business owners 
hire a new employee, they’ve got to make sure they’ve got the 
right candidate – it’s too expensive to make a mistake.  When 
a small business owner is running classified ads, spending 
time reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates, it takes 
significant time away from running the business. Diverting the 
entrepreneur away from the business at hand to hire employees 
can seriously affect profits.  Also, especially in the small 
business environment, it’s important a new employee work well 
with the owner and the other members of a small staff.   

Myth 4: Personal profiling takes too much time.

Granted, some personal profiling tests do take a lot of time.  
Some can require candidates to answer hundreds of questions.  
Shorter tests, like DISC, can yield a lot of information with 
fewer questions.  The DISC assessment, for example, only has 24 
questions and can be completed in 15 minutes.  Because the first 
phase of the test is taken online, results take mere minutes.  
The interview with a specialist to interpret the DISC’s results 
takes anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes.  That’s less than three 
hours – a fraction of the time it took to recruit candidates, 
read resumes and interview applicants!

Myth 5:  People can cheat on a personal profiling test.

Personal profiling test questions have no right or wrong 
answers, and many, like the DISC assessment, don’t have a lot 
of questions that might be perceived as negative to encourage 
a candidate to not be truthful.  Most human resources managers 
use personal profiling tests as just a part of their evaluation 
of a potential new hire, and even the experts say that companies 
should never base their hiring decisions on the test alone.  In 
reality, there are a lot of ways an unscrupulous candidate can 
cheat the entire hiring process – from padding their resume to 
not telling the truth in the interview.  Adding more pieces to 
the process may help trip them up!

Hiring decisions are rarely easy, and whether it’s feast or 
famine – the large pool of candidates today or the slim 
pickings predicted in the future – a personal profile assessment 
would be an excellent tool to help hire the best person for your 
organization.  It doesn’t matter if you are a Fortune 500 
company or a mom-and-pop retailer – everyone saves time and 
money when the right candidate is hired the first time.