GALT Consulting LLC

Everyone has a personality (insert your joke here).

A personality is like a personal fingerprint.  No two personalities are exactly the same, but there are certainly patterns.  This is well documented in academics.  There are a variety of personality assessments that qualify or even quantifies a personality.  Strengthsfinder is a popular tool developed by Gallup.  The DISC assessment is another popular tool.  I personally use the Hiring Suite for my clients because of the tools that it provides for users.  They are all very good, as anyone who has taken one will tell you.  It's pretty scary.

What is the benefit for a company or organization knowing the "fingerprint" personality of an individual?  Going back to our copier machine example, imagine purchasing a $15,000 copier without a users manual.  You wouldn't know how long to run it or perform basic maintenance on it.  The copier would burn out.  The same thing happens to employees who are not properly used.  They burn out!

Personality assessments (I'll specifically talk about Hiring Suite now) can provide an operating manual for a person.  It can tell you the types of jobs a person is best suited for (both now and in the future).  It can tell you how to manage a person (ex: how much praise to do they need).  It can give you insight into the compatibility of a person with another person (provided they have a manual too).

This works great for existing employees, but think about the additional value to potential employees.  An assessment provides a specification for a person.  It tells the person hiring a bill collector that a person with low assertiveness probably isn't a good fit.  It tells a funeral home not to hire an overly sensitive embalmer.  It tells a retail outlet not to hire someone who requires constant praise.  It tells a manager not to hire an assistant who is not very organized.

The power of these benefits is not just for the employer.  When people do things that don't match their fingerprint, they are unhappy.  A highly sensitive person working as a social worker takes their work home with them and is haunted by their client's problems.  A high tension person shouldn't work in a cubical all day. 

Personality assessments are incredibly powerful for businesses both in the hiring process and for management and team building.