Changes in current market conditions may mean that you need to take on new employees or even restructure your teams. Hiring the right people can contribute to the overall growth of your company and can also lessen the need for you to hire more employees. Great employees are an investment that will pay off in the future, therefore it is important to hire the right person the first time around. It’s therefore vital that you have an understanding of the full potential of your new and current employees, to ensure that the right people are positioned in the right areas to increase your chances of business success.
The Thomas International Personality Profile Assessment (PPA) is an effective solution, specifically developed to make your people stronger, teams more effective and companies more productive.
A PPA interview technique can help highlight; how a candidate can fit into your team, what motivates them and how they work within different team structures. You can even use a PPA on your existing team if you need to re-organise or even find out who is suited best to certain tasks.
What is a PPA?
The PPA is a personality assessment that provides a psychometric insight into individuals’ behaviours in the workplace. This allows employers to evaluate a candidate’s character traits in a more in-depth way to determine cultural fit.
The AI-driven predictive hiring technologies use soft skills assessments and automated candidate screening to help companies make better hires. They enable employers to spot the traits that predict good performance and employee engagement in the specific role they’re hiring for and to match candidates against that profile.
How does it work?
Candidates take part in an 8-minute questionnaire where they are presented with short statements and asked to choose two trait adjectives from a list of four – one ‘most like’ and one ‘least like’ them.
Each choice reflects their behavioural tendencies and personality in a workplace setting. A personal profile is created around the four traits of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance, which are ranked in order, to form that individual’s unique character.
These results will show the personal style of each individual, their approach to different tasks and people management and their strengths and limitations.
You can use PPAs to assess for achievement striving, abstract thinking, creative thinking, critical thinking, collaboration skills, communication skills, consideration, curiosity, dependability, efficiency, even temperament, honesty, leadership orientation, motivation, need for recognition, overall ambition, ownership and initiative, passion for learning, self-confidence, sociability, and more.
It would be extremely difficult to assess all these skills based on a face-to-face interview or a CV. In fact, a 2016 study by Frank L. Schmidt found that job experience is only 16% accurate in predicting job performance. Cognitive ability and personality together are 78% accurate.
Reasons to use PPAs
1.Data-driven hiring = better hires
Objective personality data enables smarter decisions. Standardised assessments can help you identify the personality traits of the ideal candidate and find people who match. This will not only reduce bad hires but also improve productivity. You get insight into an individual’s emotional intelligence and how they might adapt their style to be effective in varying situations. Eg. how might they perform under pressure? Or, what frustrations do they have in their current role?
2.PPAs work for a wide range of jobs
Whatever job you’re hiring for, even for the most senior roles such as a CFO, you can tweak the list of personality traits you’re looking for to match. Normative personality assessments will allow you to match candidates against an ideal profile and compare them with each other. You can improve your own people management skills too, by understanding why people behave the way they do, and which styles they respond best to.
3.Better hiring means better fit and better retention
In the current candidate-short market, retaining talented employees is as crucial as attracting them in the first place. By helping you find people who’ll be right for the job, PPAs can help you find people who’ll be happy in the job and want to stay. When someone is a bad fit, they usually feel bad, and will eventually jump ship even if they aren’t pushed. A PPA means that you can support your recruitment decisions by identifying behaviours that weren’t shown at the interview stage and gives you that extra insight into how this candidate will fit.
4.Evidence-based recruitment puts you on the right side of the law
Anyone who hires staff runs the risk of being sued for unfair hiring practices–usually by someone who feels they should have got the job. Well-designed, evidence-based personality assessments will give you more legal defensibility. If someone accuses you of being subjective, you can point to your PPAs to show that you’re not.
How can we help?
Our consultants are well equipped to conduct PPA assessments for all of our clients, and this has been an invaluable resource to many of our retained clients. We have successfully used this tool to assess talent at all levels of seniority within our recruitment process and have seen major benefits.
Sewell Wallis can provide a Personality Profile Assessment as part of our service, please get in touch to find out more.
