Personality profiling
As someone who runs both a business advisory company as well as a recruitment business, I have found personality profiling to be an invaluable instrument for better understanding the people with whom I work. Personality profiling is a method by which a person’s natural ‘behavioural preferences’ may be understood with respect to a general population base and therefore predicts to some degree how we are likely to respond to given situations. According to WhatIS.com, it is frequently used to “provide an evaluation of an employee's personal attributes, values and life skills in an effort to maximize his or her job performance and contribution to the company.” (see https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/personality-profile for more information).
Tools used for personality profiling have been around for decades and were used quite a bit back in the 1980’s usually as part of psychometric testing which includes an intelligence assessment as well as the personality profiling. However, the tools were more primitive back than and the ability to properly interpret the results was somewhat limited as well. Today there are a host of tools available such as DiSC, Myers-Briggs, Belbin etc but my personal favourite is Facet5 due to its accuracy, applicability and readability. Nearly all these tools are based off the ‘Big Five Personality Traits’ which is a psychological model that breaks personality down into five discrete personality factors but each of the tools assess personality against their own factors which each contain their own scales. For example, a common scale in each is ‘Introversion vs Extraversion’ which determines whether we prefer our own company and that of close friends or family (‘Introversion’) or would prefer to spend more time in a group or a team (‘Extraversion’). We all lie somewhere along each scale and it is important to note that there is no right or wrong in these assessments; every strength brings with it a level of weakness and vice versa, the point is how do we prefer to operate most of the time?
Unlike intelligence tests, personality profiling tests are not timed, but it is always better to respond to each question or pair of statements as quickly as possible since your instinctive reaction is likely to be the most accurate (over-analysis can cause problems). The results will show you how your responses compare to tens of thousands of other respondents and so you may find out that you are typically more organized than most or prefer your own company more of the time. Knowing this can then help with finding the right roles for people or assessing their potential to take on greater responsibility. In a business context, these tools can be used to help improve self-awareness which is the starting point for personal improvement and also prepare people for more senior roles that may require higher people skills or greater personal organisation for example.
We also find these tools invaluable in the recruitment space, since not only can we use these to define the ideal personality characteristics for a role, they can also assist with improving the potential for a good cultural fit within a business.
Use of these tools today are becoming ever more widespread as businesses find that for managerial roles, EQ (‘emotional intelligence’) is probably of greater value than IQ (‘intelligence’) and these tools go a long way to helping discover that.
For more information about our services, visit https://www.omtalent.com.au/services.
Ian Ash ACC, AInstIB
Managing Director OrgMent Talent Solutions