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Why Do We Need Personality Tests To Hire The Right Person In Your Business?

Has it ever clicked into your mind the importance of hiring the right person in your business? Or are you hiring a person merely just to fill up the position so that someone is there to carry out the duties on a daily basis? When you start paying attention to who you hire, you will realise that there will be vast differences in the way your company operates to achieve success. You therefore begin considering the characteristics of the right person for your company. You believe that by “reading” people correctly, you could prevent hiring the wrong candidates for the position.

You are committed to achieve success in business, which were once just dreams, into a reality. With the right people in your business, you are able to get things done correctly. In other words, you should always hire the right person for a particular position as this person would be one of the backbones in helping your business. However, hiring the right person isn’t all about just hiring them based on their qualifications. Talented employees indeed do help a company grow, but their personality aspects play an important role too. Are your observations on them accurate enough and in line with your definition of an ideal employee? With this, would you be able to employ an individual with talent, committed to their job, and exhibit satisfactory personality and behaviour? It all comes down to your ability to read these candidates before hiring them.

Jason has been handling interviews for more than 20 years. He came across individuals with a wide variation of personalities – introverts to extroverts, talkative to quiet ones, as well as serious to cheerful ones. Jason is entirely used to the interview process that he is so good with people, where he could read people easily and his judgement is usually accurate. However, he feels that his experience is still insufficient for him to carry out an effective interview process. Jason is hungry for further knowledge. He wants to know if there is any more scientific manner he could utilise to understand people’s personalities, rather than just using his observation and judgement. Therefore, Jason opted for help from a CFO to obtain suggestions regarding this issue.

DISC vs MBTI

Human personalities are diverse in nature, where there are no two individuals who share the same personality entirely. Various studies have been done on studying the diversity of human personalities. In the business world, two common personality tests are often utilised – DISC and MBTI.

In short, DISC studies the human personality based on four major aspects – Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. DISC results could tell a lot about a particular person’s working style and how they would adapt with the environment they are potentially working in. In addition to this, the results could also determine their possible approaches in problem solving in relations to the DISC characteristics they portray.

MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), on the other hand, utilises a four-category system and covers 16 types of personalities in total. Following the acronym of M-B-T-I, the four major categories include M–introversion/extraversion; B–perception/intuition; T–thinking/feeling; I–judgement/perception. Using the MBTI test, a comprehensive understanding of an individual’s personality could be achieved as it elaborates on the person’s likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, possible job prospects, and their ability to cope with other personalities.

The most significant difference between DISC and MBTI is that they both analyse personalities from different aspects. However, using them together would make your analysis on personalities even stronger. While MBTI is famous in the psychology field as a standard character assessment tool, DISC is now found to be displaying an upward trend in usage over the years due to its simplicity.

DISC

The manner and level of success your business could achieve all depends on the types of people you hire. Imagine your business cycle as the four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, and winter. You are prone to facing different challenges in each season. Hence, with various challenges comes the need of having different types of people to help you in your business.

Firstly, let’s have a look at what is DISC in general:

Dominance

A dominant individual focuses a lot of their accomplishments and they generally have a high level of confidence. Their behaviour is more straightforward and they are able to think out of the box. Challenges, competition and success tend to motivate them.

Influence

An influential person has a high ability on influencing or persuading others, thus establishing good relationships. They appreciate social recognition and even make great team members due to their collaborative trait.

Steadiness

A steady individual prioritises cooperation, sincerity, and dependability. To maintain stability, they always ensure collaboration exists in a team. They are usually calm, and very helpful and supportive of their surroundings.

Conscientiousness

A conscientious individual performs tasks with quality and accuracy, expertise, and competency. Being inquisitive in nature, they have a high sense of willingness in learning new things. In addition to that, they are highly independent.

Here, we are using the DISC personalities to determine what kind of people you need in the corresponding seasons based on three major departments in a business represented by SOS (Sales, Operations, Support).

D : Spring

The market is still fresh, it is new. Competition is slow. You feel safe but this is the best time for your business to grow. You mainly need people who are Dominant as they are trustworthy in decision making.

S – D people would be the best for sales as they work hard to fight in the market to grab as much market shares as possible in the beginning. They are quick in making decisions as they know what’s best.

O – S people would be highly supportive of the D people. Arguments could be avoided.

S – C people could responsibly organise the office documentation. Since it is growing, it would be busy and get messier. No C people? Outsource the tasks to an accounting firm! They will represent your C people.

I : Summer

The competition is getting hotter, it is fierce. You need to place extra effort in grabbing the market shares and do not lose your position. People with Influence works best in this season.

S – I people lead the sales team as they could talk more and socialise better with customers. Talkative people are needed in this season to attract and influence more people, essentially investors. O – C people are more detail-oriented, thus during high sales activity they would be more careful on the delivery of their operations. Service to customers is believed to be top-notch.

S – D people’s expertise in decision making is crucial here as the documenting processes must be streamlined. Their decisions help ensure the support department is more organised.

S : Autumn

Both your business and market are stable. No matter how hard you work, you are unable to grab more market shares as the market is matured already. This is the time for you to focus and service existing customers. People with Steadiness personality shall lead the team in this season.

S – S people would be the best to service existing customers, as they tend to be more supportive and friendly. Good customer service is the key to retaining customers.

O – I people would be the best to enhance interactions with these customers and service them.

S – I people could also balance out the departments in this season.

C : Winter

The point where the market is starting to get saturated and shows signs of decline. Your task is to defend your business, not give up, and keep going. You need people with Conscientiousness to prevent your business from falling.

S – C people are more detailed and systematic. They would be able to protect the company as they ensure policies are closely followed. You play by the rules, not merely by your instincts.

O – D people would use their skills to cut down unnecessary activities. Unfortunately, sometimes winter couldn’t be forced into another spring as decisions to change would be difficult to make. Some risks would be too huge and put the company at stake as transformation is not carried out correctly

S – S people need to be supportive of whatever the company’s decision is because winter is the toughest time of all seasons. With support and commitment, it is possible for the business to move forward to another season.

Is it entirely necessary to have different types of people in different seasons of your business? Consider this, you are locked in the same room with someone who thinks 100% like you. Due to your similarities, if you are clueless on how to escape, the other person would be clueless too.

Now, relate this scenario to having different types of people in different points of the business cycle. You need different mindsets and different approaches in handling challenges, right? This is where needing different personalities would make complete sense in helping your business move forward. Besides creating a sense of harmony or balance in the organisation, you get people who would be able to cope with different levels of stress in an appropriate manner. You cannot expect to continuously hire the same types of people all the time. This would prevent your business from moving forward. Would you be able to achieve your business goals? You may end up being stuck in winter for a long time.

If you think DISC may not be suitable enough for you, you may want to consider using MBTI instead. As for me, I do utilise MBTI to vet our team members, as well as a complex meta program to interview and hire people.

With the CFO’s help, Jason finally has a more scientific method in analysing the personality of people. He not only depends on his personal judgement to understand the personality of people he interviews, but he also makes it a requirement for them to undergo a DISC personality test. As a result, Jason now has a much stronger understanding of people's personalities.