Personality tests alone have an incredibly low rate of success in predicting job fit
Even a decade ago, researchers and editors of top psychological journals reporting the results of thepredictive power of tests* for hiring discovered something that should have opened eyes and definitively eliminated the use of personality testing for hiring by staffing professionals.
Statistics found that companies using personality tests alone have an incredibly low rate of success in predicting job fit, or either excellence or failure in actual job performance: .22r or less than 6%. The panel of prominent personnel psychologists reported one clear theme: the validities of personality measures are so low that to use them for employee selection should be questioned. One author summed it up stating:
“Why are we looking at personality as a valid predictor of job performancewhen the validities are still close to zero?”
Indeed,Peter Capelli, a leading authority on managing workplace talent and Professor of Management, Wharton School, reviewed the history of using personality-based tests for hiring and promotion decisions as far back the 1960s-1980s. To his surprise, he found that personality-based assessments largely disappeared from the lists of best practicesin human resources. However, there was a resurgence of interest in, and use of, personality testing in the 1990s that continues today.
If personality tests don’t work, why are we still using them?
Enthusiasm for the use of personality testing has stemmed from the cost and risks of a bad hire. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once estimated bad hires had cost his company over $100M. According to a recent Forbes article, the average cost of onboarding a new employee can be as high as $240,000, while the US Department of labour suggests the price of a bad hire is 30% of first-year earnings.
When unfilled or poorly filled jobs cost millions. HR is forced to turn to even blunt tools for help. Moreover, to their credit, personality tests may provide useful and interesting information about a person. However, psychological research is clear: personality measures do little to predict how well a candidate will perform on the job.
They are too broad to predict on-the-job performance, as they often don’t yield comparable results over time.
If there is a 95% chance that personality tests will not help you predict the right recruits, your future leaders or your current staffing disconnects for where you are taking your business, what will?
Please read part two to this series — Behavioural Assessments Work!.
In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you on your successes and lessons learned in workforce assessments.
About the Founder:
At the age of 9, Larry Cash’s life was almost destroyed by a test that concluded he was mentally challenged. In fact, Larry was dyslexic. A member of the Ontario Psychological Association and an International Affiliate of the American Psychological Association, he’s dedicated his life to understanding the intricacies of human behaviour, working to develop training and testing that accurately looks at unique individuality and potential. Larry is the founder and developer ofSuccessFinder, a talent assessment and career prediction platform that benchmarks behaviours from more than 40,000 highly successful professionals worldwide, across more than 500 roles.
