Hiring Employees & Personality Assessment

Employers of all sizes use personality evaluations, hiring tests and hiring assessments as part of hiring an employee. The process results in increased employee retention, happiness and productivity, because candidates who are the best fit for a particular discipline, environment, or company culture are the ones selected.

Experience has shown the benefits of hiring employees using asessments. However, until eBullpen's candidate matching and hiring test system, the process has been time consuming, costly, and just not available as a way to narrow the field of job seekers in the first place. The resume search has really been the only screening tool available to employers. Regardless of how advanced resume software and matching systems have become, there has never been a way to create a pool of potential employees from job seekers using a pre-applicant personality assessment.

eBullpen's  totally new hiring solutions makes finding & hiring employees easier,  using psychological assessment as a path to hiring the most suitable employee.

eBullpen allows job seekers to create a unique profile by taking a short hiring assessment that measures five personality dimensions:

Sociability
'Extraversion' describes how much someone seeks out and enjoys interaction with others. We all share this personality dimension to a greater or lesser extent. Extraverts typically desire lots of interaction with others and as a result are quite outgoing and social. Introverts tend to prefer spending time alone or engaged in one-on-one in-depth discussions and are usually more socially reticent and reserved.

Adaptability
'Conscientiousness' describes peoples’ approach to organizing their life and accomplishing their goals. Structured people are most comfortable when things are planned out in advance. They usually finish tasks before they are due and are quite organized. Adaptable individuals prefer not to make plans if they can help it and easily adapt to unexpected changes. They enjoy being involved in many projects and goals at the same time.

Curiosity
'Openness to Experience' describes the extent to which someone gravitates toward new and unusual experiences or stays with what is familiar. Novel individuals have an appetite for new ideas and approaches, prefer change to the continuation of what is, and are usually quite creative. Traditional people find comfort in the tried and true, focus more on the here-and-now rather than the future, and are usually quite practical.

Interpersonal Style
'Agreeableness' describes an overall attitude toward people, how you naturally relate to and interact with others. As with Sociability, we all exhibit this dimension, just to varying degrees. Accommodating folk generally relate to others by being very interested and invested in their feelings and viewpoints and are likely sympathetic and cooperative. They have a knack for comforting others. Direct people interact in a more straight-forward manner. They have a firm grasp of their own needs and are usually interpersonally confident, competitive, and forceful.

Temperament
'Emotional Stability' describes how someone confronts and handles events or stressors that are unwelcome or cause pressure. Intense people are prone to feeling their emotions with passion. They tend to respond to stress in an alert, attentive, or excitable way. Steady individuals seem impervious to negative stimulation. They likely respond in a calm, seemingly emotion-less manner.

These dimensions are adapted from the Big 5 Personality Model, which has become a widely accepted and used system of personality assessment. For a fuller account of the background and development of the Big Five: http://www.centacs.com/quickstart.htm

For an explanation of the eBullpen Personality System, and how searches and matches are made on this site,  please click here...

Using hiring tests or hiring assessment in the recruitment process has become increasingly important. Hiring employees on resume data alone without considering personality traits as a part of employee selection can lead to higher turnover and lower employee satisfaction. We encourage exploration of the role that personality discovery plays in defining your company's unique hiring solutions. The links below offer supplemental information for personality assessments in hiring employees.

About the five factor personality model:

http://www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/articles/0202/0202covstorya.asp
"Measuring Personality" from HR Magazine Feb 2002. Many psychological researchers say human behavior fits into five categories, or spectrums, that make up the “Five-Factor” or “Big Five” paradigm. The research shows that “you can account for 99 percent of the differences in human behavior with five words: stress, stimulation, novelty, dominance, achievement,” says Pierce Howard, a director at the Center for Applied Cognitive Studies (CentACS) in Charlotte, N.C.

http://www.centacs.com/quickstart.htm#Individuals
The Big Five Quickstart: An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model of Personality For Human Resource Professionals:
© Copyright 1995, 2004 Center for Applied Cognitive Studies (CentACS)
An Excellent resource for applying the Big 5 model to hiring employees, hiring solutions and work assessment!

Excerpt:
Background and Theory of the Five-Factor Model
Get ready, trainers and consultants! The personality paradigm is shifting. For three decades, the training community has generally followed the assumptions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (Myers & McCaulley, 1985). These assumptions included:

• a four-dimension paradigm
• bimodal distribution of scores on each dimension
• sixteen independent types
• the concept of a primary function determined by Judger/Perceiver preference
• a grounding in the theory of Carl Jung (1971).

The emerging new paradigm is not a radical departure from the MBTI, but rather more of an evolution from it. But, the new paradigm is sufficiently different from the old one to require a significant shift in thinking. For example, the new paradigm involves:

• five dimensions of personality
• a normal distribution of scores on these dimensions
• an emphasis on individual traits (the type concept is gone)
• preferences indicated by strength of score
• a model based on experience, not theory

Big Five Personality Test
This test measures what many psychologists consider to be the fundamental dimensions of personality
OutOfService.com, created by Jeff Potter, has run personality and self-awareness tests since 1997. The tests are derived from scientific psychological research and the feedback provided to participants is based on statistical analyses of large amounts of data, unlike many other "tests" on the web. Many of the tests on OutOfService have been developed in collaboration with several respected researchers and professors as parts of ongoing research. 

More Hiring Solutions
Great information articles on hiring employees from Fast Company Magazine

Interested in a Candidate's Profile? Want more specific hiring assessment before you interview?
http://www.employeeselect.com/why_use_tests.htm Low cost Employee Selection Testing

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