Why Personality or Behavioural Assessments have little impact on businesses?

by Ammar Khairi | 16th September 2019

 

Despite researchers claiming the use of personality or behavioural assessments outside academia as debatable, many companies still resort to rely on these assessments as tools to hire the right candidates.

Needless to say, many of us could relate to the amount of emotions we often feel when companies we work at, or a position we are interviewing for, require us to sit through such assessments.

To the uninitiated, this triggers anxiety and one might even start to worry that he or she might score poorly. In many situations, low scores raise red flags, and most companies would often categorise this as “unfit for employment” - a commonly used HR term.

 

Unfit, incompatible, the Odd-One

Imagine these terms being called out loud when the external hired “experts” brought in by the management dissect the result of your assessment.

Now, how about those who are familiar with it? Perhaps many of us could relate to few of these key assessment areas:

 

 

Keep in mind these tests are designed to measure certain scopes of your qualities, and in this case, towards building your personality and behavioural profiles. However, how do you measure technical qualities of specific job functions, for instance, a branch-banking manager’s on-job competencies via these?

How about Internal Auditors, L&D heads, Bursars or Chief Technology Officers?

 

Do these factors relate directly to productivity?

Despite this old question, it is still relevant for us to ask ourselves today on how we measure the qualities of our talents to match with future business goals and needs.

Human Resources Director Australia quoted that personality test will never encourage your managers to have the kinds of flexible thinking you need, because the test makes the ultimate decision. When there’s a test to fall back on, managers inevitable step back from responsibility and surrender to the test.

Fara Iza Abdul Rahim, Development Head for the Malaysian financial industry’s technical competencies at Finance Accreditation Agency reveals that having a set of required traits would not translate into required behaviour, which may be the basis for the success of a particular role.

 

 

A mixture of both


According to a survey in 2018, FAA argues that many organisations are still confused with the differences between personality assessments and technical competency assessments, and its impact on businesses.

 

“The best way is to have a structured process to assess the individual’s knowledge and skills, and its application, for both behavioural and technical competencies.”


 

Technical competency refers to the knowledge and skills of any particular job function, for instance, risk managers, internal auditors, compliance officers and sales director.