Written by Loice Valentine Kaunda | Branding Magazine | January 2019
The hiring process is a complex and exhausting part of management. When hiring employees, management cannot just randomly pick any person, they have to pick the right person out of a pool of qualified people.
What exactly is the right person for the job? Is it the person with the highest qualifications or the most work experience? Most employers tend to look for the person with the best qualifications and the most work experience because it means that the person, they hire is able to get on their feet fast and do the job right. Which is good. But what about that other important factor when hiring; the personality of your potential future employee?
Let us start by defining the term personality trait. A personality trait is a reflection of a person’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Simply put, we are looking at the consistency of a person’s actions and thoughts. During the hiring process, the personality of a person is not usually evaluated until the interview stage, if it is considered at all. The usual process is that interviewers ask questions about work experience, educational background and a few personal questions such as which church do you go to. The international scene in hiring now tends to give people personality tests just before an interview or as part of the interview process to see what kind of person they are potentially hiring.
Employers should understand the core personality traits in order to know which employee they are going for. There are five core personality traits and these are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Each trait has two spectrums to it. Openness to experience has the inventive person versus the cautious person. The inventive person appreciates art, is in touch with their emotions, comes up with unusual ideas and is curious whilst the cautious person is pragmatic and close minded. Employers should be aware that the inventive employee is unpredictable and tends to work well in an environment that does not have a strict routine. The cautious employee on the other hand is an employee who excels in data driven jobs and routine work.
Conscientiousness is made up of the efficient and organized person versus the easy-going and careless person. The efficient employee tends to be dependable, organized, self-disciplined and acts within their duties. Their behavior is planned ad they are highly focused on their tasks.
The easy-going employee is flexible but seem to reflect a lack of reliability. Agreeableness is composed of the friendly versus challenging personality. Friendly employees tend to be compassionate towards their workmates and will cover for them to help them out whereas the challenging employee is competitive and argumentative. It can be argued that the friendly employee is sometimes not the best candidate for a manager as they are often bulldozed by their subordinates whereas the challenging personality will not usually make for the best of subordinates as there are often competitive and argumentative.
Neuroticism comprises of the sensitive and nervous personality against the secure and confident personality. Neuroticism looks at how often employees experience and express their unpleasant emotions and how emotionally stable a person is. The secure and confident employee is stable and calm and the nervous employee is unstable, insecure and tends to be emotionally volatile. These do not work best in high pressure environments where provocation is likely to occur. Extraversion comprises of the extrovert employee versus the introvert employee. The extrovert employee is assertive and highly sociable whilst the introvert is reserved and reflective, they are more of thinkers whilst the extrovert is more of an action-packed person. Extroverts are dominant in social settings.
But why is the personality trait of a person important when hiring? Because the right person for the job is more than just qualifications and work experience, the personality of the person matters. Imagine hiring a manager to run a branch for you in your absence based on the qualifications and experience of the person but the manager turns out to be a very friendly personality, so friendly that they end up being domineered by the employees under her. You will end up having to manage the branch yourself even though you hired a manager, giving you more headaches.
Most employers consider the skills and knowledge of the field as more important than the personality but the fact of the matte is skills can be learned but the personality cannot be changed. Most Accounts related jobs in government hospitals are done by casual workers who had no skills or knowledge of the job but where trained on the job. These are the very people who train the University Accounting students who do their industrial attachment at these hospitals. Research shows that once thrown in a job, employees learn the required skills in less than three months. Personality traits on the other hand, are highly ingrained from a young age, some argue from birth and hardly, if ever change.
A potential employee’s work ethic, honesty, and compatibility with the rest of the team are far more important. Every organization has a certain culture and every culture is suited to certain personalities. Let us assume that a vodka manufacturing company wanted to hire a marketing officer for an aggressive market penetration strategy.
The company receives a CV from a man with a master’s degree in marketing and ten years’ experience from one of the large companies but is reserved and has no social media presence; and another CV from a man with a degree and three years’ experience but with an outgoing fun personality and social media presence. Who should the company hire? The outgoing man because he has the best personality to market alcohol.
Taking these factors into consideration, do you think personality is an important qualification for new hires? Or do you think experience is more important? Answer our poll below.
