Personality Hiring

I think that Ellen Simon brings up an interesting trend in her article, Employers Study Applicants' Personalities. After taking several business classes, I have come to realize the importance of relationships between coworkers and superiors in an organization.

Businesses are becoming more customer service and team oriented. Therefore, group communication and cooperation are becoming more and more important. The best way to ensure that a company will succeed is to select employees that can not only perform their job, but want to be there and can work well with others. Thus, personality can be a deciding factor for teams. People usually work better together when they like each other. It has also been found that job satisfaction is affected by the people that you work with. Retaining good employees has become a large focus for organizations today, so organizations have started to administer several different tests, including personality tests, in order to determine the best fit for their organization.

As mentioned in the article, personality testing can be biased. Thus it is important that multiple people are questioning applicants for employment to ensure that these biases are given as little weight as possible in the actual hiring decisions. Also, organizations do not want employees that have the same viewpoints, because then nothing innovative will be created, which will cost the organization a great deal of revenue. However, if the organization takes time to train HR professionals and other employees in effective hiring techniques, they can limit biases and still get employees with good personalities that will benefit the organization.